Benefits, Risks... and surgery

Statistics are of course done for the broad spectrum of society and the risk is always deemed small when dealing with a population vs individual. Hence the stats are always in favour of the greater good or spread out enough not to elicit panic. They are done to concentrate benefits and waterdown negatives. Regardless the risk has to occur somewhere to someone.

It reminds me of Todd's surgeon who told him that there was only a 1% chance of brain damage during surgery. As if it was something very rare. Which may not be the case if you have the right variables. Like a poor surgeon, or one that frequently stays up to late. To get a 1% you could just as well have 90/100 doctors getting 0% complications in 100 surgeries and you could have the other 10/100 very shoddy doctors performing the same 100 procedures and screwing up 10 each but if you choose the wrong surgeon you've increased your chances to 10%.

Regardless, if they do a million procedures there's still
10, 000 ppl that end up with brain damage. I think that would justify caution and knowing your risks and knowing how late your surgeon went to bed the night before.