Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almost certainly have less free time in which to immerse themselves in a field of math that isn't going to help them.
Journalists, on the other hand, often should or need to rely on statistics to convey useful and pertinent information in a meaningful way. That they often obviously aren't taught and otherwise usually don't learn statistics, or at least not effectively, strikes me as a much bigger problem than doctors who don't have that knowledge.
Now, the people who write reports like these, they should have and use a thorough working understanding of statistics. I'd say what's really missing is effective collaboration between the people who do the work and the people who should be doing and writing the analysis.
2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.
You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.
Today, a lot of people have degrees and even the ones who don't have the opportunity to engage with a lot of self education through the internet, a lot of it informal (like HN). Doctors are also more knowledgable than they were but the gap has narrowed. The difference between doctors and the median (or 75 percentile) person has narrowed. Obviously, they still know a helva lot more about medicine, especially in their specialization but when it comes to Science as a discipline or statistics/math/etc., they aren't that far ahead of the pack.
*BTW, oncologists are probably the most versed in science, research methodology & statistics because they participate in a lot of research and choosing a course of treatment may be a choice between treatments based of studies with samples of insufficient size or duration to make absolute statements about. One study follows remission rates of patients segmented by the presence of specific genes in the cancer. Another remission rates for a slightly modified treatment and slightly different segmentation. etc.
Anyway, I don't think cases is irrelevant or incorrect thing to look at here. The number of cases is the number of people that need to be treated. If you are talking about prevention, the number of cases is a relevant indicator of success.