Medicine relies on statistics more than ever, but these numerical insights aren’t always useful to our health and well-being. Statistics can help us make healthy decisions but they should not be used as a day-to-day instruction manual. Statistics can be misleading. There is a 12.9 percent lifetime risk that a woman born in the United States will get breast cancer at some point in their life. It’s also true that there’s a 100 percent lifetime risk that we will die at some point. All that really matters is what is happening with you, the individual, at any given time. The reason I bring this up, is that too often we see statistical, analytical, peer-reviewed articles cited and read as gospel truth. Mark Twain once wrote, “There are three types of lies—lies, damn lies, and statistics.” So what do we believe? I go back to common sense and a good pinch …