I was rewatching an old video on YouTube and the guy was able to walk again after 10 months of practicing yoga and losing 140 lbs. If no one on earth can exactly predict when someone will die or if they’ll be able to walk again, how and why do doctors come up with these predictions?
https://youtu.be/qX9FSZJu448
In: Mathematics
I’m a surgeon. We don’t usually use terms like “you have X months to live” because that’s not possible to know specifically. These predictions depend on what the scenario is. In trauma, we compare it to other patients and their expected recovery. In cancer, there are many calculators using the patients data that talk about disease free survival, mortality, and morbidity. We use similar calculations based on NSQIP data to predict outcomes after emergency and elective procedures. But, we prefer to say, “there’s only 15% chance of survival in one month in this scenario” and then go into what that survival might look like (nursing home, feeding tubes, drains, etc).
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