I don’t think they’re getting stupider. They’re what they’ve always been…a source of conventional wisdom. When conventional wisdom said bloodletting was good for health, they bled their patients. When mercury was considered a medicine, they administered it. When hacking off limbs was considered the best way to fight infections, their toolkit included bone saws. When electroshock therapy was considered a treatment for mental illness, they shocked the hell out of their patients. I’m sure that one day we’ll look at chemotherapy and radiation as barbaric practices representative of our ignorance of how easy it is to deal with cancer.

Scientists/researchers advance the state of our medical knowledge and doctors, over subsequent generations, absorb what they find and practices slowly change. But there’s always a lag. What we need to get past is the notion that doctors are some font of truth when it comes to medical information. They are, largely, a snapshot of what was conventionally believed at the time they graduated med school. We don’t have a system that effectively updates their knowledge or keeps them in the loop for cutting-edge research. They do learn a set of first principles that can help them reason about novel situations better than a lay person, but only if the right answer is one that follows from those principles as opposed to being counterintuitive.

It’s the nature of being a practitioner rather than a researcher.