Here’s a cool bit of literature review (yes, I deliberately wrote “cool bit of literature review”) by economist Austin Frakt in response to a previous infographic I posted on this blog.
Kaiser Fung shows that less can be more when it comes to visualizing complex data. If you show too much, none will read or understand; better to sacrifice a little detail for the sake of clear communication.
Austin Frakt shares this chart to illustrate an important point: cancer deaths are not plummeting. As you may notice in the chart, cancer diagnoses soar while mortality rates plateau, but that contrast is another issue not address in his post.
This article has been on my to-read list for what feels like a burdensome amount of time, so I’m going to try to take a stab at lunch tomorrow.
This graphic, from WBUR’s Common Health blog, originally comes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which further based the graph on epidemiological data from a 2010 BMJ paper.
Hat tip to Austin Frakt.
Kim Rees imagines the horrific answer to be a Venn diagram made with pie charts. And it turns out there’s an app for that.
It’s great to see experts and reporters dig down into methodology. I recently posted on a critique of a study which suggested that higher US cancer spending drives superior outcomes. (At least, that’s how I read it.) Faced with significant criticism, the authors of the study published a response on the HealthAffairs blog. And now Dr. Aaron Carroll has written a lengthy response to that response on the Incidental Economist blog. It’s a good post you should check out. But I’ll give you the punch line anyway: based on the evidence, it doesn’t look as though the United States’ higher spending on cancer care is buying us any better outcomes.
I’m delighted to see Reuters report on the sometimes confusing nature of cancer statistics, and how these numbers can sometimes mislead (otherwise well intentioned) researchers.
I was drawn to the article by this parenthetical anecdote posted by Austin Frakt on the Incidental Economist: “Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.”
