Risk: what the word means in a health horoscope

In writing about health, one word turns up almost inevitably: risk. It sounds like measurement, like figures, like something somebody has looked up. So it is worth a calm look at what a statement of risk has to do to deserve the name. After that you can place sentences of that kind without effort – in a health horoscope, in advertising, in a headline.

A word from another field

In statistics and in insurance, risk has an exact meaning: how often a particular event occurs in a particular group within a particular stretch of time. Three details, and not one of them can be left out. Without the event you do not know what is being talked about. Without the group there is no comparison. Without the period the same figure means a great deal one time and nothing the next.

If one of the three is missing, the sentence is not a risk but a mood.

Twice what?

The commonest piece of misdirection sits in the small word double. Suppose that among ten thousand people in one group something affects two of them, and four in another. That is a doubling, and it sounds alarming. In absolute figures it is two more cases in ten thousand. Both versions describe the same thing, and only the second answers what you wanted to know.

From this follows a rule of thumb that carries far beyond astrology: a ratio without the figure it started from is not information, it is an effect.

Where such figures come from

They are counted, and that is laborious work. Large groups are followed for years, what happens to them is recorded, and the record is compared with a group that differs in exactly the feature under study. It takes time and it costs money, and it is the only way a risk figure comes into being.

A birth chart supplies none of that. It is a drawing of positions at one moment, not a count of cases. A frequency can be read off it no more than a street map shows how many people live in a particular street: the map shows where the street runs, and for the counting somebody has to go there.

So when an astrological text speaks of risks, the word is borrowed. Something else is usually meant, and there are better words for it: a leaning, a habit, a place where experience shows you grow careless. You can measure descriptions of that kind against your own life. A figure nobody has counted remains an assertion, however firmly it is put.

Two questions that always fit

Compared with what? Any statement about a raised or lowered frequency needs a second group. If it is missing, it is left open whether a difference is being claimed at all.

How many in a hundred? This question forces every ratio back down to earth. It is impolite, it is simple, and it settles in one sentence whether somebody knows something or is telling a story.

Where the text stops

One thing is untouched by all this: symptoms need examining, and by people with training and instruments. No text replaces that, and none may delay it. How a text sounds changes nothing about it. A reassuring wording tells you as little about your body as an alarming one; both are talking about something they have not counted.

Why the choice of words is more than pedantry

A text that works with dangers it cannot put a figure to leaves behind an unease you can do nothing with. It cannot be checked and it cannot be refuted; you have to take it away with you all the same. A text that speaks of leanings and habits invites you to go and look instead: Is that so? Do I recognise myself? Was it like that last week?

The difference does not lie in what is known about you – that is equally slight in both cases. It lies in what the text intends to do with you. You can apply this yardstick without any prior knowledge, and it holds far beyond astrology. What readings there are at all, and what each of them promises, is set out under Horoscopes.