From PLoS Medicine:
We therefore felt that it would be useful to create a tool whereby patients could make a choice between different strategies, based on a simple visualization of the probable outcomes associated with each of them. There is some evidence that visual tools, of various sorts, can enhance aspects of communication about risk; in addition, we thought it important that the tool in question not require efforts to weigh, indirectly, various harms and benefits, or to understand concepts of probability and risk, but to rely simply on a direct appreciation of the differences in likely outcomes. Thus we created the “roulette wheel” model of probabilities, which provides viewers a simple visual tool upon which to base choices. (Of course the utility of this tool may be diminished among patients with visual impairment, such as color-blindness, or perhaps cataracts.)Technorati Tags: hilarious journal articles, plos, decisionmaking