6.8 Maricarmen Climént - Risky Business - How to communicate uncertainty

Do Doctors know best? How do you explain the risks and benefits of a medicine when you yourself don’t really know? We chat to Maricarmen Climént, Research and Editorial Officer at Sense about Science about risk communication and how we best help patients to make better choices in the face of uncertainty?

Maricarmen has a diverse background in science journalism and risk communication and holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine and an MSc in Science Communication. She also worked for four years at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, which we discuss. Do clinicians, deep down, think they know best? How can you teach risk to those whose career is predicated on supposedly knowing everything? How do you explain complexity in a simple way when the reality is rarely simple?

Things are never certain and we discuss how clinicians can best navigate this difficult terrain and the importance of training in understanding and explaining risk. Dr Julian Treadwell’s research we mention - " GPs’ knowledge of the absolute benefits and harms of treatments is poor, with inaccuracies of a magnitude likely to meaningfully affect clinical decision-making and impede conversations with patients regarding treatment choices" https://bjgpopen.org/content/4/1/bjgpopen20X101016

In our micro-discussion we delve into the paper “Bad news: how the media reported on an observational study about cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19”. Are the media deliberately biased - or just incompetent - in how they report on scientific research? And how much are the papers’ authors themselves to blame? https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/17/bmjebm-2023-112814. 

As with all of our guests, Maricarmen shares with us a Memory Evoking Medicine, a career anthem and book that has influenced her career or life.

Sense about Science: https://senseaboutscience.org/. 

Spurious Correlations: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations. 

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