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Originally Posted by mikeod
Sure, you can look at it that way. On the other hand, you could look at it as:
Out of 100,000 people, 999,800 had colonoscopies without serious complications. Or out of 100,000 people, 999,994 of them had colonoscopies and survived.
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Sure, you can look at it that way if you choose to. That's the way I choose to look at colon cancer. Of all my close family members (grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins, I don't know of one who had colon cancer. In my lifetime I only have known one person who had colon cancer and he was my sister's father-in-law. And he was a butcher who liked to nibble on raw meat. So there was a reason for it.
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One of the problems with those figures is that they don't detail the overall health situation of those undergoing the procedure. What underlying conditions may have contributed to the outcome? What was the age range of those who suffered poor outcomes? You could go on and on distilling the data to get a reasonable idea of the risk for yourself undergoing the procedure.
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Yes, exactly! And you could apply the same reasoning to those who get colon cancer. "....they don't detail the overall health situation of those...." who get colon cancer. "What underlying conditions may have contributed to the outcome?" People will say, "I knew someone who ate a healthy diet and still had precancerous polyps. Yes,
in their opinion they were eating a healthy diet, but it's only their opinion. The overwelming majority people don't eat healthy diets but many of them think they do, or will say that they do (partly because of ignorance and partly because of selective memory).
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Because of its open structure, wickipedia is not a resource I would consider without reservations.
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Well, at least it's something. It's more information than anyone else has offered.