 What is risk? It may seem like a daft question, but as it turns out, there's quite a bit of confusion over what someone's thinking when they use the word risk. For instance, are they thinking about the mere possibility of something unpleasant happening or the actual likelihood of something going horribly wrong? It's an important distinction, especially if you want to reduce or avoid risk. When everything else is stripped away, what we're talking about here is worth. What's something is worth now and how it changes over time, whether it's your savings, your possessions, your livelihood, or your health? Unfortunately, it's a fact of life that bad stuff happens. Your car breaks down, you make a bad investment, you're made redundant, you get sick. And as a result, you lose something of worth. This is not good news, but there are ways of reducing the pain. You can take action, for instance, to avoid bad things happening. You can invest upfront to cover future losses. Or you can take a chance and simply hope for the best. But how do you know which is the best option? Guesswork probably isn't the greatest idea as you have no idea whether the investment you make to avoid a loss of worth is, well, worth it. What you really need is some idea of how big a potential loss of worth might be, and how much this loss can be reduced if you take a certain course of action. And this is where risk comes in. Risk, and this is my definition, is the chance of a specified loss of worth occurring. It's a number, a probability that is linked to a particular reduction in worth. Risk is not the possibility of something going wrong, instead it's the probability of a specific bad thing happening. And because of this, it allows the pros and cons of different risk avoidance, management, and adaptation measures to be weighed against each other. So how does this apply to health risks? Well, that's a topic for next week's Risk Bites, so see you there.