ABSTRACT
Any clinical decision in medicine is made to maximize the benefit to a patient’s health. A decision to make some type of intervention brings an additional dimension of risk to the decision-making process. The decision then becomes a matter of weighing the risk of an intervention against the benefit it should confer. In many cases, these risks are so small that they are not even considered. For example, if a person is having chest pain at home, should they be taken to the emergency room? A small risk is involved with that transfer-there could be a motor vehicle accident along the way, for example. However, this risk is so small in comparison to the benefit of receiving acute medical care in such a situation that it is essentially ignored.
