[cjf101]

That is blackly humourous to me. Wow. Thanks for the link.

"The researchers found that certain intensive procedures were performed less often on the high-risk patients in the study during meeting dates than outside meeting dates.

One explanation for these findings, the researchers said, is that physicians who don’t attend the conferences take a more conservative approach for high-risk patients; another is that the physicians who stayed behind were reluctant to perform intensive procedures on another physician’s patients while that doctor was out of town. Survival rates might be higher because, for high-risk patients with cardiovascular disease, the harms of intensive procedures may unexpectedly outweigh the benefits."

This sounds a little like the programming conference effect. Where someone comes home excited about a new way of doing things, and applies it without first proving it out in isolation. Except people die.

[neutralid]

I haven't heard about the programming conference effect. That makes sense. Proving it out involves exposing the theory to a wide range of adversarial inputs to demonstrate robustness.

There seems to be a similar trend in mortality with respect to getting treated in a teaching hospital vs nonteaching hospital:

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles...

At teaching hospitals treatments, may be very conservative as well (perhaps even more so than at non-teaching hospitals) with residents whose teaching is freshly learned.