Useful information misleads when it is asked to answer the wrong kind of question.

A diagnosis can guide care while narrowing what others notice about the person.

Population evidence offers probabilities, not a finished account of one individual.

Scientific skepticism protects the boundaries of a claim rather than dismissing expertise.

I first read the story of Norman Cousins in college, and for decades, I remembered it with remarkable confidence.

Cousins had terminal cancer. He left the hospital, watched comedy films, and somehow laughed himself into remission.

It was a terrific story. Clean, hopeful, and easy to repeat. It may even have contributed to my decision to become a physician. It was also quite different from the story Cousins himself told.

He had suffered from a severe, disabling illness that physicians believed might be irreversible, but not terminal cancer. His recovery occurred alongside medical care, large doses of vitamin C, changes in his surroundings, sleep, and comedy films that he believed gave him periods of pain relief. Cousins later acknowledged that one case carried little scientific weight. He had hesitated to tell it because he did not want to create false hope.

My memory had quietly rewritten it anyway.

The qualifications disappeared. So did the competing explanations. Laughter moved from one part of a complicated recovery to its apparent cause. What remained was the version most worth retelling: a dying man had laughed himself well.

When the summary takes over

Human beings need summaries. Reality arrives with too much detail to reconsider from the beginning each time we make a decision.

A year of medical care becomes a paragraph in the chart. Thousands of........

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