What's more likely: that the hardest working, highest average IQ professionals are slow to adopt something that would help them save their patient's lives? Or that the writer of the article is biased and exaggerating things?
This is already the case with checklists, which are proven to save lives but resisted by many doctors: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2090554-not-all-surgeon... . In my limited experience with doctors a non-insignificant proportion seem to care more about their own ego than saving lives (the kind of people who would bring up their own IQ in a discussion).
Medical error is apparently the third largest cause of death in the US (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading...), and surgical checklists have been shown to reduce error rates by 40%: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/jan/14/health. In any other profession it would be completely unacceptable to refuse to use a technique like checklists on the grounds that "I don't make silly mistakes"; imagine if an engineer working on safety-critical equipment said "My code doesn't need any testing because I don't make mistakes".
I have checklists for holiday packing with different sub checklists for beach, ski, etc vacation.
At work there are checklists for code review that I personally find don't help. Why? I didn't make that checklist myself. It's a checklist basically containing every mistake anyone ever made that could have or should have been caught in review.
This leads to a checklist of hundreds of Well-d'uhs, because a lot of people make many silly mistakes.
I have a personal review checklist with the things I often forget. I think checklists only work if they're full of pertinent information, and for many professions I think that depends on the person using the checklist and whether they're motivated to use it or obliged to.
This kind of generalization is normally read as "Typically, doctors [as a profession] are slow to…" rather than "Literally every doctor is slow to…". TFA supports that statement with a metric and some reasons why.
> What's more likely: that the hardest working, highest average IQ professionals are slow to adopt something that would help them save their patient's lives? Or that the writer of the article is biased and exaggerating things?
The former. Most doctors work within systems, and can't just start using new tools they think look neat. Instead, they use approved (often mandated) tools.
Medical professionals need to be slow to adopt alternatives because they are required (and expected) to be highly reliable. Just because there's a particular industry where rebuilding the whole infrastructure every 6 months without fear of any consequence is considered normal or even desirable, that does not mean the rest of the world should or even could operate likr that.
This approach has pros and cons: too slow to adopt surgeon hand-washing, but too fast to adopt Thalidomide. A few thousand years of experience has led us to err on he side of being conservative these days.
Combine this culture with lack of spare time for young doctors, lack of immediate incentives to save patient money, and lack of exposure to IT innovations, and I can totally see them being slow to adopt new tech.
At this point I go into every news article fully expecting it to be an attempt by the author to manipulate me.