378 • MEDICAL DECISION MAKING/MAY–JUN 2011

Uncertainty is a fundamental experience in human life, and medical decisions are no exception. This will not surprise readers of Medical Decision Making. The communication of risk information is a crucial activity in medicine, as risk information informs the judgments and recommendations of physicians as well as the decisions of patients. Risk communication, however, is complicated not only by the need to express uncertainty effectively, efficiently, and accu-rately but also by the aim to receive and perceive these communications to equitably enable consistent, coher-ent, and useful action. Two articles in this issue provide compelling dem-onstrations of these complications. Wegwarth, Gaissmaier, and Gigerenzer1 asked physicians to esti-mate the effectiveness of cancer screening on the basi