Just had a convo with an old friend about most difficult clinical situations we've been in, and he recalled doing CBT with an older mathematician with a severe case of OCD who would always want to know the exact likelihood that something would happen. A lot of this was interpreted as resistance of course but my friend had little luck getting this person back to work and functioning again, but it did get me thinking how neat it would be if there was a book on this kind of thing. Like the possibility of car accident (or them resulting in death) getting HIV or STDs (despite protection), getting/surviving particular disease (cancer, heart disease, etc), getting food poisoning...and the list goes on and on. There have been some good scientific articles on lifetime prevalence of certain illnesses of course and likelihood of certain outcome, given a particular disease (though conclusions or numbers do not necessarily always agree). Same thing about medical procedures and chances of success. And of course, a lot has been written on medical screening and what the test results actually mean. I think people, including some very educated ones, continue to ignore base rate fallacy.
This is not the first time this idea has occurred to me. I once read a paper about how the irrational fear of flying (this was a couple of years after 9/11) now resulted in many more road fatalities, and in fact I remember thinking how awesome it would be if we had similar data on everything, likelihood of dying from getting trapped in an elevator, from getting infected from an illness merely from shaking the hand of an ill person, whatever. So if somebody was not willing to handle "dirty" money because she'd fear serious illness, well, you could say that the chance of that happening is 1/9334549947435841 and that you're more likely to die from a mosquito bite than that. Lol, I hope that would not simply result in the person replacing one phobia with another. But it would be helpful in appealing to a rational person who was not satisfied with "it's quite unlikely" or "there is a low chance of that happening."
This is not the first time this idea has occurred to me. I once read a paper about how the irrational fear of flying (this was a couple of years after 9/11) now resulted in many more road fatalities, and in fact I remember thinking how awesome it would be if we had similar data on everything, likelihood of dying from getting trapped in an elevator, from getting infected from an illness merely from shaking the hand of an ill person, whatever. So if somebody was not willing to handle "dirty" money because she'd fear serious illness, well, you could say that the chance of that happening is 1/9334549947435841 and that you're more likely to die from a mosquito bite than that. Lol, I hope that would not simply result in the person replacing one phobia with another. But it would be helpful in appealing to a rational person who was not satisfied with "it's quite unlikely" or "there is a low chance of that happening."
