Medicine as a Safety-Critical System
A Probabilistic Risk Assessment of 50 U.S. Diseases
From the essay
Medicine routinely makes decisions that involve irreversible harm, high societal cost, and significant uncertainty. Yet, unlike other safety-critical domains—such as nuclear power, aerospace engineering, or chemical processing—medicine lacks a unified, explicit framework for probabilistic risk assessment. We introduce a simple, transparent risk metric defined as the product of disease frequency and graded consequence severity, capturing not only mortality but also chronic disability, functional impairment, recurrence, and societal burden. Using this framework, we analyze fifty common diseases in the United States. The numerical results presented here are illustrative and deliberately conservative, not definitive rankings.