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The most hopeful aspect of this article is the fact that:
i) The media are having an increasing effect in health education.
ii) Attention is being paid to how people assess health risks.
111) People are becoming more concerned about their own health.
iv) Precise figures are now available to underline health risks.
Give a title to the passage.
Answers
Answer:
If asked, ‘What are health decisions?’, most of us would answer in terms of hospitals, doctors and pills. Yet we are all making a whole range of decisions about our health which go beyond this limited area; for example, whether or not to smoke, exercise, wear a seat belt, drive a motorbike, drink alcohol regularly. The way we reach decisions and form attitudes about our health are only just beginning to be understood.
The main paradox is why people consistently do things which are known to be very hazardous. Two good examples of this are smoking and not wearing seat belts: addiction helps keep smokers smoking; and whether to wear a seat belt is only partly affected by safety considerations. Taken together, both these examples underline elements of how people reach decisions about their health. Understanding this process is crucial. We can then more effectively change public attitudes to hazardous, voluntary activities like smoking.
Smokers run double the risk of contracting heart disease, several times lung cancer, as compared to non-smokers. Despite extensive press campaigns (especially in the past 20 years), which have regularly told smokers and car drivers the grave risks they are running, the number of smokers and seat belt wearers has remained much the same. Although the numbers of deaths from road accidents and smoking are well publicized, they have aroused little public interest.
If we give smokers the real figures, will it alter their views on the dangers of smoking? Unfortunately not. Many of the ‘real figures’ are in the form of probabilistic estimates, and evidence shows that people are very bad at processing and understanding this kind of information.
The kind of information that tends to be relied on both by the smoker and seat belt non-wearer is anecdotal, based on personal experiences. All smokers seem to have an Uncle or an Auntie who has been smoking cigarettes since they were twelve, lived to 90, and died because they fell down the stairs. And if they don’t have such an aunt or uncle, they are certain to have heard of someone who has. Similarly, many motorists seem to have heard of people who would have been killed if they had been wearing seat belts.
Reliance on this kind of evidence and not being able to cope with ‘probabilistic’ data form the two main foundation stones of people’s assessment of risk. A third is reliance on press-publicised danger and causes of death. American psychologists have shown that people overestimate the frequency (and therefore the danger) of the dramatic causes of death (like aeroplane crashes) and underestimate the undramatic, unpublicized killers (like smoking) which actually take a greater toll of life.