How do you judge the risks and benefits of new medical treatments, or of lifestyle choices? With a finite health care budget, how do you decide which treatments should be made freely available on the NHS? Historically, decisions like these have been made on the basis of doctors' individual experiences with how these treatments perform, but over recent decades the approach to answering these questions has become increasingly rational. Statistics and maths are used not just to test new treatments, but also to measure such fuzzy terms as quality of life, and to figure out which treatments provide most "health for money".
While the decisions of health authorities affect all our lives, the underlying calculations are rarely discussed in the media. To explore these difficult decisions and the role of maths in evidence-based medicine, we have put together a package of six articles, three podcasts, a career interview and a classroom activity.