Mimi's Wishing Well

Here is a story about statistics. 

In 1982, a professor was diagnosed with mesothelioma—a rare and very serious cancer that is considered "uncurable" with a median survival time of eight months after diagnosis. After hearing this news the professor started to panic. Luckily his scholarly way of thinking kicked in and helped save him from despair. This is what he realized:

 1. A median survival of eight months meant that half of those afflicted lived less than eight months. The other half lived more than eight months. What half did he belong to?

2. The professor was young, lead a healthy lifestyle, his tumor was detected early, and he had access to the best available treatment. So, he decided that he would most likely belong to the group that lives longer than eight months. But, how long?

3. When looking at a diagram that plotted survival time of patients with mesothelioma, the professor saw that the curve had an asymmetrical shape. Half of the patients were on the left, steep side of the curve, living less than eight months. The other half were on the right, gradually sloping side, living more than eight months. In fact, some lived several years beyond diagnosis. Once again, the professor decided that there wasn't any reason why he couldn't be at the far end of the tail.

4. Finally, the professor realized that the graph that he was looking at was plotting patients that were diagnosed 10-20 years earlier. Surely both conventional treatments and our understanding of what patients can do to reinforce the success of such treatments had improved in that time. How far could the professor extend the far reaching tail of the diagram?

Steven Jay Gould, the professor in this story, died twenty years later of a disease unrelated to mesothelioma. He lived 30 times longer than the oncologists had predicted.

What is the lesson of this story? According to David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD and author of Anticancer: A New Way of Life, "Statistics are information, not condemnation. The objective, when you have cancer and want to combat fatality, is to make sure you find yourself in the long tail of the curve."

(If you want to read a more detailed account, see Chapter Two of David Servan-Schreiber's book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life.)