We really don't have much to say about this beyond the obligatory "this is why it's important for doctors to have rhetorical and argumentative training." But it's about a fallacy that affects judgment in the context of a medical science controversy, ergo:

The most obvious application of judgments about probability comes from the field of medicine. We've discussed a key problem doctors have in communicating with their patients -- many patients don't understand numerical probability. So if a doctor says, for example, "there's a 1 percent chance you'll go blind from this surgery," many patients will systematically misunderstand what that means. One possible way to get around this limitation is to use qualitative statements instead of percentages: "it's extremely unlikely that you'll go blind from this surgery." But, as we'll see, there are problems with this approach as well...

When the condition is seen as more severe, people are significantly more likely to think the doctor believes the condition is more likely to develop -- even though the doctor used the same words to describe the probability... Bonnefon and Villejoubert argue that the doctor-patient relationship is similar: your doctor uses "possibly" in the case of deafness to "soften the blow," not as an honest assessment of probability... Their data backs this argument as well: they asked patients why the doctors chose the word "possibly," and in the case of deafness, they were significantly more likely to say that it was a case of "face management," rather than a judgment of probability.

The post ends up in an admitted deadlock: both qualitative or quantitative descriptions of medical risk are likely to be misinterpreted by patients. A neat little rhetoric of science problem, but one that we're not sure is resolvable in any easy way. It does highlight the inadequacy of medical ethics outs like "the patient should be given as much information as possible." The irreducibly rhetorical nature of intersubjective relationships means that much more than information - and much less information - is being transmitted in a doctor-patient interaction.

References:
* It's possible that your stupidity will affect your ability to understand this post [Cog Daily]

Previously:
* Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
* It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
* Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion