Helping Patients Decide: Ten Steps to Better Risk Communication

With increasing frequency, patients are being asked to make complex decisions about cancer screening, prevention, and treatment. These decisions are fraught with emotion and cognitive difficulty simultaneously. In this commentary, we highlight 10 methods that have been empirically shown to improve patients’ understanding of risk and benefit information and/or their decision making. The methods range from presenting absolute risks using frequencies (rather than presenting relative risks) to using a risk format that clarifies how treatment changes risks from preexisting baseline levels to using plain language. 

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