
Common Mental Shortcuts Can Cause Major Physician Errors - Bostonian
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/upshot/mental-shortcuts-medical-errors.html
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Bostonian
I think problems like the ones below would be alleviated by using logistic
regression models, which do not have left-digit bias.

"We hypothesized that doctors may be overly sensitive to the left-most digit
of a patient’s age when recommending treatment, and indeed, in cardiac surgery
they appear to be. When comparing patients who had a heart attack in the weeks
leading up to their 80th birthdays with those who’d recently had an 80th
birthday, we found that physicians were significantly less likely to perform a
coronary artery bypass surgery for the “older” patients. The doctors might
have perceived them to be “in their 80s” rather than “in their 70s.” This
behavior seems to have translated into meaningful differences for patients.
The slightly younger patients, more likely to undergo surgery, were less
likely to die within 30 days.

Our study confirms previous work that found doctors are overly responsive to
patient age when diagnosing illness, and that showed how seemingly irrelevant
factors‚ such as the difference of a few weeks of age, could govern
physicians’ decisions about treatment, with potentially life-altering
consequences for patients.

Left-digit bias could affect many clinical decisions. For example, patients
with hemoglobin levels of 9.9 grams per deciliter may be perceived as being
substantially more anemic than patients with hemoglobin levels of 10.0 grams
per deciliter (the difference in the two values has no clinical
significance)."

