Another entry inspired by How Doctors Think for your (in case you missed the last it was about confirmation bias). This time it’s about the differences between primary care physicians and specialists and the way they’re viewed by society.
I just loved this long quote from Dr. Eric Cassell’s book Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine:
One should not confuse highly technical, even complicated, medical knowledge — special practical knowledge about an unusual disease, treatment (complex chemotherapy, for example), condition or technology — with the complex, many-sized worldy-wise knowledge we expect of the best physicians.
The narrowest subspecialist, the reasoning goes, should also be able to provide this range of medical services. This naive idea arises, as do so many other wrong beliefs about primary care, because of the concept that doctors take care of diseases. Diseases, the idea goes on, form a hierarchy from simple to difficult. Specialists take care of difficult diseases, so, of course, they will naturally do a good job on simple diseases. Wrong. Doctors take care of people, some of whom have diseases and all of whom have some problem. People used to doing complicated things usually do complicated things in simple situations–for example, ordering tests or x-rays when waiting a few days might suffice–thus overtreating people with simple illnesses and overlooking the clues about other problems that might have brought the patient to the doctor.
Never really thought of it that way but it makes a whole lot of sense.