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Comment by nihonde | Hacker News Reader

The news here (Japan) was talking the other day about cases of TB slipping through diagnosis because younger physicians had no experience with it. Older doctors knew what it was right away.

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Older doctors can probably diagnose TB better, but I would wonder if that can be used as a core competency measure of a doctor. Also, I believe there are cases younger doctors diagnose a lesser-known disease when older ones could not.

There can be all different sorts of anecdotes, but the link was about a study with more than 100k doctors, which would be a stronger evidence that the probability of survival is better for patients with younger doctors.

Funny, this reminded me of my own surgery that had complications. My surgeon said that he has done over 200 similar surgeries and I was his first complication. The first thing that came out of my mouth was no wonder you don't know how to handle complications because you have been running around like a headless chicken. In the end, postop complications were addressed by a surgeon half way around the world than the operating surgeon.

> The first thing that came out of my mouth was no wonder you don't know how to handle complications because you have been running around like a headless chicken.

I daresay you drew the wrong conclusions from this incident. All things being equal, a doctor with more experience and a lower rate of complications should be your preferred choice for any medical procedure.

"Lower rate of complications" is much better than "ZERO rate of complications". When you had zero problems, you have no experience handling problems. When you had some problems, you know how to handle problems. When you had too many problems, you are careless.

I don't get the phrase you used, "running around like a headless chicken" - do you mean the doc did not pay attention to postop complications?

I meant doctor didn't come across confident in how he was handling the complications. He was trying lot of different things without proper reasoning. He was clearly flustered. I was actually more calmer and methodical than him.

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