> 3M is useful. They make a lot of stuff we need.
Doctors are even more useful, but they do end up in prison if they commit murder
Doctors are even more useful, but they do end up in prison if they commit murder
Literally every seasoned doctor has what they call a 'small cemetery' of their failures. Got this from a GP, you don't need to be a surgeon for this to apply. In fact GPs have probably highest chance of saving/not saving lives due to volume of cases and potential severity of those, even if they don't do any invasive medicine themselves.
Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.
Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.