I came across a very interesting article today on MSN Health regarding the dangers of diabetes.
The article talks about a survey done by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In the survey, very few people understood the threat that diabetes posed to their health. In fact, most people feared shark bites, plane crashes, or cancer more, even though they were more likely to get diabetes.
For example, 49% of the respondents feared cancer, while only 3% feared diabetes.
This article illustrates how are fears and perceptions often don't match up with reality. While people fear shark bites more than diabetes, only 70 confirmed shark attacks occur each year around the entire world. In contrast, over 233,000 people in the U.S. died of diabetes in 2005.
Why is this?
In my opinion, this is due to the phenomena known as misleading vividness. This is where a small number of very dramatic events are taken to outweigh a significant amount of statistical evidence. In other words, an event is so dramatic that it makes quite an impression in your mind. Your fears of this event are heightened, and you develop a distorted perception of the likelihood of the event.
Misleading vividness is also known as the Volvo fallacy. Joe thinks about buying a Volvo. He hears about someone whose Volvo had a wheel fall off the highway. The car crashed and the person died. So Joe won't buy a Volvo, despite the strong safety reports.
Shark attacks are vivid, sensationalistic events, particularly if you've ever seen the movie Jaws. Plane crashes are vivid, sensationalistic events. Even dying from cancer can be a vivid event, in the sense that cancer deaths are much more heavily publicized by the media, and we are constantly reminded of the hardship of going through this disease.
Dying from diabetes, however, is not a vivid event. You rarely hear about people dying from diabetes on the news. Death from diabetes is a very slow process. It's not a headline grabber. And thus it does not make the same emotional impact on your mind that a plane crash does.
But it should. We are at a much greater risk of diabetes than we are of getting in a plane crash. And the cost of diabetes, to both our health and our finances, is staggering. The average annual medical cost for someone with diabetes is nearly $12,000. A diabetic's medical costs are at least 2.3 times that of someone without the disease. And the complications that can result from diabetes are numerous, ranging from numbness to blindness to amputation to death.
The bottom line is that we should be much more worried about diabetes than about Jaws.