Think of it this way: If modern medicine has an effective treatment for something that ancient Egypt had no treatment for, where does that show up in the percentages quoted above?

It doesn’t.

The percentages are all percentages of ancient treatments, not modern ones. If the figure were 100%, it would mean that we kept their treatments, or some equivalent, and went on to develop new treatments for other things.

Considering our bodies haven’t really changed, improving on 36% of what was already shown to work isn’t bad — but the real improvement is all the additional things we can treat.

“A bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense…”

Now I look at your statement:

“As long as he was arrogant, wore a white coat, put his drugs in capsules, and spoke the local language, I doubt most people today could tell the difference if they were treated by an ancient Egyptian doctor.”

So if you’re saying he would have to be arrogant in order for most people to be unable to tell the difference, aren’t you implying that most doctors are arrogant? Isn’t that a bias? Isn’t this blog called “overcoming bias”?

Now I look up arrogant in the OED:

“… aggressively assertive or presumptuous…”

Now for a definition of presumption:

“the act of presuming a thing to be true”

So unless you’ve somehow reliably ascertained that most doctors are arrogant, you’re being presumtpuous, that is, arrogant..

So you’re being biased on a blog called ‘overcoming bias’, by arrogantly calling doctors arrogant…
I’ll leave you with one last definition:

hypocrisy: “the assumption or postulation of moral standards to which one’s own behaviour does not conform”

so the modern medicine undoes natural selection? It would be interesting to ponder on the consequences. I know I avoided being voted off this island due to the ulcerative colitis. Bleeding to death ain’t fun.

Think about it – how many people you know would be dead by now without the modern western medicine you pretend to have so much disdain for? And how many of these things would have been fixable in ancient Egypt? If you pray, give thanks every night for not living 2,000 years ago.

If an ancient Egyptian doctor came to our time an took a high school class to learn about sanitation, he could do many functions (though obviously not all) as well as a modern doctor with a twenty-five year long education. This supports the claim is that doctors do a lot of work where they do not provide much added value given their expense.

As such, the claims about vaccinations and antibiotics are not terribly relevant. These do not encompass a large portion of our medical expenditures (to my knowledge). Hanson’s point seems to be that doctors are overpaid or we use doctors for work that does not require their expertise, and that a lot of the advances in medicine have been fairly simple and inexpensive and should not translate into our current costs. This post certainly supports that.

Though “Someone drilled a hole in someone else’s skull, and he didn’t die for at least a few months” doesn’t really count as brain surgery. And the motivation was probably to let out demons or evil spirits or some such, so I’d hardly tout that as the efficacy of ancient medicine.

So this could just be indicating that there is a “long tail” of conditions & remedies where we still use the old treatments because it is not yet cost-effective to find new ones. Yet we may be getting most of the benefit at the head of the condition distribution. The biotech revolution seems quite promising for better addressing this long tail.