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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Questionable pneumonias are nothing new. The question is who decides what represents a pneumonia and what the gold standard is for the study you site? Oftentimes two radiologist both with years of experience reading chest x rays will differ in interpretation son chest x rays. That is where experience and training and the art of medicine come in. Ad a patient you want a Doctor who is going to weigh the risk benefit of treatment correctly in the case of a questionable pneumonia. It wasn't overconfidence but caution that leads to "overduagnosis" of pneumonia and let's not forget that antibiotics currently have a role in the treatment of copd under current treatment guidelines. The scoring and "core measures" used to measure physicians are what is deficient. They aren't sophisticated or even correct enough to measure the effects of superior medical education. One thing is for sure less training and knowlege are not beneficial in highly complex fields such as medicine.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Peter, thanks for taking the trouble of looking that up!

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