Medical professionals tend to be overly cautious when evaluating threats. The CDC says a woman should never have two glasses of wine in a single meal (or any i

Medical professionals tend to be overly cautious when evaluating threats. The CDC says a woman should never have two glasses of wine in a single meal (or any if she's fertile and sexually active) but we laugh this off as the CDC being the CDC and ignore it. It's their job to be concerned about health risks and so they are. Doubtless they'd ban downhill skiing, driving over 35 mph, and parachuting if they could but thankfully we don't give them that power. But we do give them the power to ban medicines and that's where actual trouble can start. And it's understandable. If every time a Japansese person stole something you heard about it sooner or later your intuition would be convinced that they're all a bunch of thieves. If you heard about every bicycle accident you'd be scared to ever ride. US cops do hear about it every time one of their number is killed and we can see the resulting paranoia with which they treat the public. And the people at health regulatory agencies get fed a constant stream of medical mishaps. To counteract this bias any organization really needs to make explicit cost benefit analyses with real numbers if they're going to make sensible decisions. We force highway safety and toxicology regulators to do this. We really ought to have the medical regulator do it as well but for some reason we don't.