| > Why wouldn't you collect all information you possibly can? From a decision theoretical viewpoint, you would certainly want all the information you could get. For humans running a business in today's medicolegal environment, it's a very different set of issues: 1) Collecting information costs time and money. 2) Making good decisions requires the most precious resource of all, which is doctor brain-time. There isn't enough of it to spend on information with little probability of benefit. 3) If you get sued for malpractice, the unneeded data you collected probably would not have helped the patient, but it could help the attorneys arguing that you missed something. Juries struggle to understand the cost of false positives. Even though there are valid issues here, doctors don't always make the right tradeoff in this regard. Oftentimes, I think it is more an issue of lack of training or experience that leads a doctor to consider a test to be unneeded. In the case of mammography, if doctors spend too much time doing screening and not enough time doing diagnosis, their screening performance degrades, which I think is due to a lack of feedback on their decision making[1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21343539 |