It can get quite disheartening actually. I wanted to see if this piece generated much interest here on Medium, and if so I’ll do another one exploring some more examples — some much worse than the Opdivo example. Specifically, I could do a whole article on how the claims associated with disease screening are misleading (eg, prostate cancer, breast cancer).

The innumeracy of much of the population is to be expected; it’s the obvious superiority of absolute numbers that frustrates me. There is absolutely no reason for drug ads facing patients to present relative numbers, other than to promote sales, of course.

Also, I didn’t even get into it in this article, but consider the fact when a new drug becomes “standard of care” based on relative risk reductions, then the next big drug will be based on results relative to that most recent drug. Thus, we have a cycle where pharma companies will create newer drugs with better relative risk profiles but which have ever-diminishing real benefits. They’ll pull shenanigans to create “clinical significance” to get the drugs approved then run patient-facing ads leveraging relative risk reductions. 😕