Background:
Facts Boxes…
communicate the best available evidence about a specific topic in an easily understandable manner. The most important pros and cons are contrasted with each other in a table, thus allowing even people with no medical or statistical background to make competent decisions.
The idea…
of Facts Boxes was developed by Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. They could demonstrate in several studies that the general public could be successfully informed about harms and benefits of medical treatments via facts boxes.
Sources:
Schwartz LM, Woloshin S, Welch HG. (2007). The drug facts box: providing consumers with simple tabular data on drug benefit and harm. Med Decis Making 27:655-62.
Schwartz LM, Woloshin S, & Welch HG. (2009). Using a drug facts box to communicate drug benefits and harms: two randomized trials. Ann Intern Med 150:516-27.
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We have prepared a facts box with transparent, up-to-date information about the risks and benefits of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing, which include the overall and prostate cancer specific mortality rates for groups that participate in PSA screening and those that do not.
It also specifies which number of PSA screening participants will receive a positive test result even though they do not have prostate cancer (called a false positive result), and how many healthy men were treated unnecessarily due to these false positive results.
Here is an icon array visualizing the data:
In an New York Times article, published in March 2010, Richard Ablin, the scientist who discovered PSA in 1970, argues against routine screening as "a profit-driven public health disaster", which in fact is hardly more effective than a coin toss. You can find the whole article here.
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