doctors are investors in white coats

When a doctor is confronted with a sick patient, he is tasked with assessing the patient’s malady and personal background, and then deriving a conclusion and resultant course of action from that information. Unfortunately, the known information about the patient is incomplete, and the medicinal field lacks perfect understanding of how the human body works. Thus doctors are forced to make probabilistic decisions in an uncertain environment…just like investors.

Sadly the comparative professional payoff matrices are quite perverse. If an investor performs well he makes a lot of money, and if he performs poorly HIS FIRM loses money (usually not him). If a doctor performs well he heals his patient (I assume this is quite gratifying) but does not receive additional financial upside, whereas if he performs poorly his patient might…DIE. Talk about high stakes betting.

Anyways it seems to me that patients (and doctors if probability principles aren’t regularly discussed) stand to benefit from recognizing that a given doctor is just doing the best he can with the information presented, and consequently 5 doctors could arrive at 5 different conclusions if the patient’s issue is complex.

Not sure where this post came from. Let me know if you disagree…I know very little about medicine.