| I think OPs point is that the article ignores the reason why the heuristic is used in the first place, which is to optimize the process at scale. The real cost of gathering additional data and knowledge about the circumstances in the 0.01% chance you know that you have at this point, at scale, means you'll end up with worse overall outcome by not being able to scale to all events that need the attention. Now, if a doctor is just being lazy, doesn't check anything, says you'll be fine take Tylenol and then spends the next half hour reading a book until the next appointment. Or simply wants to go through twice as many patients to make more money. Ya sure, that's just being lazy and useless, and negligent, replace them by a rock at that point. But if there are 100 people with initial symptoms, and only 1 doctor. And the deep dive to properly asses the likelihood of a 0.01% chance event in the case of symptom: "My hip hurts when I walk" takes multiple hours, a lab test, many follow ups, etc. While this happens and maybe out of the 100 patients waiting, some have symptoms like: "I'm actively bleeding out my mouth.". "I have spores on my skin." "I'm in so much pain I can't fall asleep." All with known much higher likelihood of something pretty bad and urgent. That's why triage is so important. And this use of the heuristic at scale might make sense when considering the cost/time and available resources trade off. At the individual level, it means eventually someone will get shafted by this, they'll be sent home with Tylenol, and 3 days later will have a stroke and it would have turned out they are the really rare case where hip pain could indicate a risk of stroke due to say a blood cloth. But at a larger scale, many more people will have received the treatment they needed more urgently. |