[mieseratte]

This reminds me of a classroom debate from school:

If you, the day before a major surgery, saw your doctor reading through a medical textbook on the topic of your surgery, would you be more or less confident in their abilities?

Some said they wouldn’t trust the doctor, as they held some notion that the doctor should just know these by virtue of their being a doctor. That if they don’t it is a sign of their ill preparedness and lack of ability.

Others had no such issues, that it is legitimate and good that a doctor would be adequately preparing for the surgery by studying.

If you think of things more towards the former, and you end up as a “last minute, read a book” type, as I tend to be, you might wind up feeling like an imposter.

[gshdg]

Or you might think that a doctor who does a surgery like this every day, has done so for years, and for whom brushing up would thus be redundant is the doctor you want.

Granted, that requires that it be a reasonably common surgery and that you trust that the doctor gives sufficient consideration to non-surgical treatments instead of pushing patients towards surgery.

Perhaps a decent analogy would be a dentist capping a cavity or doing a root canal. They’ll do tens of thousands of these in a career. You don’t really want to be the first or even the hundredth patient s/he does this work on. And by the time they’ve done a thousand, looking it up would be silly.

[ZeroGravitas]

I knew someone that worked in a Dental school (though not actually a dentist themselves) and when looking for their own new dentist looked for someone young and recently out of school because the techniques had moved on so quickly, but the people who had graduated earlier were unlikely to update what they were taught.

I guess they'd see consulting a textbook in a better light than most.

[mieseratte]

You’re inserting things into the question that weren’t there and tearing it down. Nothing was said about a “routine performance” which is certainly common enough today to that it is worth asking but is not always the case and not always common through time.

Regardless, it is never a bad thing to be overly cautious and redundant. I once heard it said that if necessity is the mother of invention, redundancy is the mother of victory. That is how I view the question.

[travisjungroth]

They’re exploring an ambiguity in the question. No need to tear them down.

I feel similarly. If I’m getting a common heart surgery, I’d like to go with someone who does it every day. Reading a textbook is a negative signal that they do this frequently. (A checklist, on the other hand, is not and I’d be happy to see it used).

If I’m getting some rare surgery or there’s a complication, then seeing the doctor read a textbook makes sense. They can be very experienced overall, but not in this exact case.

[mhb]

One argument in favor could be that it is helpful in the same way as a checklist.