I wonder how much this is influenced by medical staff being overworked.
I think this part of the article is what the big problem is:
“Eighty percent of doctors don’t think probabilities apply to their patients,”
I've recently gone through 4 years of medical treatment, and it's still ongoing. Only to find out this week that I have Lyme disease. Given that the chances of getting Lyme where I live is relatively small, it was overlooked for many years. I even asked doctors to test for it, but they refused. Meaning I'm a direct example of doctors not considering non-regular cases. It cost me over $20,000 out of pocket. Not to mention the other things it cost me.
I don't know if its a form of arrogance or how they are trained or a combination of both. But can be life-destroying for patients to say the least. The leading cause of death in Lyme patients is suicide.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/air-traffic-controllers-are-d...
Chronic Lyme is very controversial and likely not the true etiology
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predicti...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2540558/pdf/bmj...
Seems like they're getting pretty close. Air traffic and medicine are not the same field, I wouldn't expect the probabilities and risks to be the same.
> The study found that nearly 2 in 10 controllers had committed significant errors in the previous year — such as bringing planes too close together — and over half attributed the errors to fatigue. A third of controllers said they perceived fatigue to be a "high" or "extreme" safety risk. Greater than 6 in 10 controllers indicated that in the previous year they had fallen asleep or experienced a lapse of attention while driving to or from midnight shifts, which typically begin about 10 p.m. and end around 6 a.m.
also, a case of "hearing hoof prints and thinking horses, not zebras."
a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) that didn't show up on an x-ray is what would concern me. They were focused on the most common causes of the issue they had at hand, and likely with all of the information available at the time. when the new information was available, the treatment course changed. That's often how things work in emergency medicine.
Perhaps the only saying more common in trauma than "if you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras" is "the problem is caused by the trauma until proven otherwise".