This actually wasn’t so obvious until I’d spent my little sabbatical immersed in the worlds of mathematics and finance, thinking every day about the nature of risk. The banks’ problem was not all that different from the situation faced by some of my patients: their seemingly minor risk factors had, over time, compounded into an unstoppable, asymmetric catastrophe. Chronic diseases work in a similar fashion, building over years and decades—and once they become entrenched, it’s hard to make them go away. Atherosclerosis, for example, begins many decades before the person has a coronary “event”
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