[falsedan]

Doctors are selected and trained to memorize insane amounts of facts, and how to match symptoms to facts. Updating those facts is hard since they're stored when the brain is young and still great at learning (there are refresher courses doctors are required to attend to keep their accreditation, but they lean heavily towards learning new facts, not changing existing ones).

[et2o]

Most doctors are constantly learning new information. It's not just refresher courses, you have to pass frequent and comprehensive examinations to stay board-certified.

I have no idea why HN has this bias against physicians.

[kaitai]

Frequent = a test every ten years in internal medicine and some continuing education/maintenance of certification. Even that is under attack (http://knowledgeplus.nejm.org/abim-moc-petition-reveals-deba...).

Doctors are human and some are constantly learning new information while others aren't. There are a lot of pressures on them that are perhaps orthogonal to "learning new things" and "keeping up with the best evidence."

[angelbob]

Personal experience with physicians has been my primary way to gain this bias against physicians.

You could also do research on, say, Lister or checklists and get the bias that way.

[nickff]

You are probably right, but it is not clear which category this finding of a fungus-Alzheimer's correlation would be in. Most theories could retroactively be put in to either category (new facts or changed facts), so I am not sure whether this framework gets you anywhere.

In any case, the relative difficulty of updating previous beliefs does not excuse the failures of doctors which cause a great deal of death and suffering. When engineers fail to update their beliefs, and people die, it is called negligence.

[calinet6]

This doesn't apply as cleanly to research, however, where the whole point is to discover new facts.

[falsedan]

Well, medical researchers aren't doctors (they can't proscribe medication or perform medical procedures).