Someone on HN once left a comment that made it really clear why it is better to "let x guilty men go free than incarcerate one innocent man." A big part of their point: if you put an innocent man in prison, you are still letting a guilty man go free. The real killer is still out there. And you aren't even looking for him because you have announced "case closed."
So this is similar to part of the problem with low value or harmful medical practices proliferating. If you are doing x, you probably won't be doing y. Its use actively excludes the use of better therapies in most cases.
But, worse, biological processes are complicated and there can be critical windows of time for x to happen. If people are ignorant of such a window and how to use it effectively, some people will have dramatically better outcomes than others in a way that promotes the all-too-common perception that it's just random. For medical issues, this can be literally life or death.
Furthermore, use of low value procedures pollutes the data with lousy outcomes. If you don't identify that x treatment is the culprit, then the perception that patients with x condition have yadda prognosis proliferates. This actively promotes poor outcomes by encouraging doctors and patients alike to accept a poor outcome as the norm and to be expected for your condition.
Additionally, once a practice proliferates, it tends to persist. It becomes a habit. Habits are hard to break.
And doctors are people. Most people want to do something, anything rather than doing nothing. For a doctor, doing something, anything is probably less likely to get them sued for malpractice than taking a wait-and-see approach, even if waiting is the wiser move. It's going to be harder to defend the choice to do nothing if it goes to court. It flies in the face of how the human mind works.
It takes substantial education, wisdom and self restraint to do nothing when the problem is your responsibility to fix. Even if you know that's currently the best course of action, it is all too easy to cave in the face of social pressure, especially if you have reason to believe that not going along to get along may come with substantial penalties (like a malpractice lawsuit).
To my mind, the following linked article is related to that last point, but I also wrote it and I've had four hours of sleep. Apologies if it seems unrelated:
Culture could be changed from the expectation that most encounters with a doctor result in an action. The problem is visiting a doctor costs hundreds of dollars for a short amount of time. It doesn't matter if you have insurance or free universal health care, it still costs hundreds of dollars regardless of the layers of abstraction you put on top of the billing.
I personally wish encounters with doctors resulted in more tests or other data gathering (and hopefully that data made available de-identified for analysis)
So this is similar to part of the problem with low value or harmful medical practices proliferating. If you are doing x, you probably won't be doing y. Its use actively excludes the use of better therapies in most cases.
But, worse, biological processes are complicated and there can be critical windows of time for x to happen. If people are ignorant of such a window and how to use it effectively, some people will have dramatically better outcomes than others in a way that promotes the all-too-common perception that it's just random. For medical issues, this can be literally life or death.
Furthermore, use of low value procedures pollutes the data with lousy outcomes. If you don't identify that x treatment is the culprit, then the perception that patients with x condition have yadda prognosis proliferates. This actively promotes poor outcomes by encouraging doctors and patients alike to accept a poor outcome as the norm and to be expected for your condition.
Additionally, once a practice proliferates, it tends to persist. It becomes a habit. Habits are hard to break.
And doctors are people. Most people want to do something, anything rather than doing nothing. For a doctor, doing something, anything is probably less likely to get them sued for malpractice than taking a wait-and-see approach, even if waiting is the wiser move. It's going to be harder to defend the choice to do nothing if it goes to court. It flies in the face of how the human mind works.
It takes substantial education, wisdom and self restraint to do nothing when the problem is your responsibility to fix. Even if you know that's currently the best course of action, it is all too easy to cave in the face of social pressure, especially if you have reason to believe that not going along to get along may come with substantial penalties (like a malpractice lawsuit).
To my mind, the following linked article is related to that last point, but I also wrote it and I've had four hours of sleep. Apologies if it seems unrelated:
https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...