[throwaway729]

> yet the handout probably won't tell you that.

That seems like a major problem. Is there any reason that more detailed information can't be included? Mathematical literacy may be a problem, but that doesn't mean that there aren't millions upon millions of mathematically and scientifically literate consumers who could use this information effectively.

[dbbolton]

You would probably have to ask a pharmacist, but from the clinical side I can tell you most prepared health information that we can give to patients has to be very bare bones and comprehensible to essentially everyone at or above an 8th grade education level- I assume because it is considered too resource intensive by the publishers to produce multiple versions of the same information, and people with higher education typically have the initiative/means to ask their doctor the right questions or research the information themselves.

I'm not trying to justify any of this, but that's how it is.

Not sure if it will be helpful in the future, but I can tell you that descriptors used with side effects follow a standard convention:

    very common: > 10% 
    common: 1%-10%
    uncommon: 0.1% - 1% 
    rare: 0.01% - 0.1% 
    very rare: < 0.01%

But you will probably never know the exact origin of these figures (like how many patients were studied, what populations were included, how tightly the study was controlled, whether adverse effects were self-reported, etc.) without doing some intense searching. And even if you did, I doubt it would have a significant impact on your healthcare. I don't want to go on a tangent about the nuances of pharmacology in clinical medicine, so I'll just circle back to my point that you should trust your doctor, or else find a new one that you do trust.