“Risk” is a term that comes up frequently when people discuss medicine and health: What’s my risk of heart attack? Breast cancer? What’s my risk of dying from a complication of surgery? Or having a dangerous reaction to a drug? But according to Mark V. Pauly , Wharton professor of health care systems, consumers don’t necessarily use that term in the same way that medical and insurance experts do — which is a potential pitfall that can lead to less than optimal health care decisions and faulty policymaking. In the May/June 2007 issue of Health Affairs , Pauly takes an economic view of risk and says that the concept is often misunderstood when it comes to health and health policy. “The language we have come to use in describing health, healthcare and medical spending sometimes gets in the way of clear   thinking and sometimes reflects (without being explicit) quite different ways of thinking,” he writes. “There is no better example of this than the use of the term risk.…