
Doctors are surprisingly bad at reading lab results. It’s putting us all at risk - daegloe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/10/05/feature/doctors-are-surprisingly-bad-at-reading-lab-results-its-putting-us-all-at-risk/
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Konnstann
Good article, however the probability is a bit weird concerning the test
false/true positives. something with a false positive rate of 5% with a
prevalence of 1/1000 only means a 2% true positive rate if you assume the only
thing we know about the patient is their test result. If I go in complaining
about flu symptoms and my test comes back positive for influenza, there's a
much higher likelihood of me having the flu than whatever the prevalence is vs
the false positive rate of the test.

The choice of which test to administer is also a financial one for doctors,
which fact researchers hate, because tests with a high correlation for
problems leads to higher insurance payouts for preventative care, etc.

Finally, while I do somewhat agree with the main point of the article, that
doctors need to be trained better on these tests, right now the movement in
testing, especially with imaging-based tests, is to quantify and extract
metrics so that interpretation plays a much smaller role. Ultimately the first
test administered after a visit needs to be chosen more carefully, however the
odds aren't as bleak as the author suggests, in my opinion.

