At last month’s Business Innovation Factory Summit, a keynote speaker shared a personal story of self- diagnosing and battling breast cancer. Breast cancer has been adopted as an universally recognized female charitable cause by marketers worldwide. Pretty pink ribbons abound from yogurt cups to sneakers to credit cards. So what are the chances that you assumed that the keynote speaker was a woman?

He wasn’t.

This got me thinking about probabilities in healthcare. 

The success of our healthcare system relies on the early self-reporting of patients who themselves have to determine if a complaint warrants medical intervention, the unknown realities that intervention will have on future life and its associated cost. 

When most Americans live in denial about their level of diet, fitness, weight, stress, sleep deficiency, toxin dependencies, what really are the chances of us adopting a more preventive and proactive mindset to our health? It takes hubris for a male patient to decide to make an appointment with a mastectomy surgeon, a proctologist or urologist. It takes chutzpah to walk into a hospital without any remote understanding of the bill that will be incurred. It takes a tremendous amount of blind trust in a medical advisor, when most of us only spend 30 minutes with our physicians annually. 

Ultimately it is the patient alone that has to resolve the questions of “Is it really worth worrying about? Do I want that kind of upheaval in my life? Do the benefits of intervention outweigh the costs of doing nothing?” With little but statistical evidence to guide them, decision making in healthcare seems more like a throwing dice.

http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/video/bif5-michael-samuelson