TY - JOUR T1 - A little ‘suspect’? JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 85 LP - 85 DO - 10.3399/bjgp19X701105 VL - 69 IS - 679 AU - Raymond Ringland Y1 - 2019/02/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/69/679/85.abstract N2 - Intelligence agencies like the CIA understand the need for precision when attempting to convey the relative degree of certainty/uncertainty about the prospects of any specific future event occurring. The words chosen to describe how likely something is to happen are important and can have far-reaching consequences in terms of effort then taken to mitigate risk or investigate. These have been coined ‘words of estimative probability’, or WEPs.Whereas precise and collectively understood WEPs have the ability to give a clear indication of risk, and thus enable good decisions to be made, poorly chosen WEPs conversely mislead regarding probability, and risk wrong decisions being made. At policy level this may lead to policy failure.O’Brien et al1 studied how this might apply in everyday clinical general practice. Vocabulary chosen by doctors to convey the likelihood of an illness being present was on a spectrum of probability from ‘never’ to ‘certain’, with the halfway point … ER -