SMDM Annual Meeting Co-chairs Alan Schwartz and Brendan Delaney are pleased to announce the 2009 Annual Meeting will include a pre-meeting symposium on Saturday, October 17, 2009 in Hollywood, California, USA, titled, Getting Tools Used: Lessons from outside health care.

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I had planned to write a post pointing to the new background paper on comparative effectiveness research by the Society for Medical Decision Making, which I think does a very good job of explaining the purpose and practices of such research and debunking several myths.

I had also planned to let people know about SMDM President Mark Robert’s presentation at the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness earlier this month.

However, fellow SMDM member David Hickam has already blogged on both, so instead, I direct you to his site, The Comparative Effectiveness Blog (and particularly the postings for June 10 and June 12). Thanks, David!

Behavioral economist (and 2009 President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making) Dan Ariely appeared on NPR’s Marketplace to discuss reasons for the swine flu panic. Read or listen to the interview here.

He focuses on the difference between the value of an identified life and a statistical life, as well as the impact of uncontrollability on risk perception (part of the constellation of factors Paul Slovic has referred to as being associated with “dread risk”).

The availability heuristic is also relevant here - there is very little reporting of deaths associated with seasonal flu and a lot of reporting about potential new strains. This leads to an underestimate of the risk of seasonal flu, even in the young and elderly.

The cover story in the March 2009 issue of MD NetGuide is “The Risk of Risk: Explaining Difficult Concepts to Patients“, by G. Stephen Nace, a physician at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria who I recently had the pleasure to meet. Making Medical Decisions is prominently cited in the piece.

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Readers who use the linkedin.com social networking site may be interested to know that I’ve started a “Medical Decision Making” group for “People who are engaged in the study of medical decision making, including members of the Society for Medical Decision Making.” The group  is open to any LinkedIn member to join.  Just visit the “Groups” link, “Find A Group”, and type “medical decision making”.

I’m pleased to announce that Medical Decision Making: A Physician’s Guide will soon (well, within 2 years) be available in a Portuguese language edition from Editora Guanabara Koogan SA/GEN in Brazil.

Any translation is exciting, but I’m particularly happy about this because I had the great pleasure of spending five weeks teaching Brazilian health care faculty in southern Brazil about a dozen years ago and I really enjoyed the people, the country, and the language. Otima!

Many patients in many countries don’t pay the full cost of their medical care, which makes cost a less important factor in medical decision making, for both many patients and many physicians.

On the other hand, nearly everyone pays the full cost of their veterinary care, and taking your pet to the vet is a good time to think about how medical decisions should get made.

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The 2008 annual meetings of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) included a “symposium exchange”. A symposium by SJDM members was presented at SMDM 2008 (Pennsylvania, PA) and a symposium by SMDM members was presented at SJDM 2008 (Chicago, IL). At least one of the talks reported on a study of behavioral economics for weight loss that has recently received considerable media attention.

Videorecordings of the symposia are now available. You can find links at http://www.sjdm.org/content/video-recordings-2008-sjdmsmdm-symposia

I’ve just come back from the annual meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. One of the most interesting talks, by Roy Baumeister, demonstrated the power of lemonade to reduce decision biases.

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I was recently at a workshop for National Science Foundation Principal Investigators focused on how to communicate research to the public and the media. One of the suggestions was to develop a three-word summary of the principle message of your research work. This is hard.

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