The success of multi-step medical procedures is often overestimated by doctors.
According to Scott Aberegg, M.D., a critical care pulmonologist at the University of Utah Health, the study, which was published in, exposes a serious logical gap among doctors who fail to recognize that each step in the process carries its own risks that can reduce the likelihood that the desired medical outcome will be achieved.
When a person thinks that a combination of events is more probable than any one of its individual parts, it is known as the conjunction fallacy. “Many physicians simply aren’t good at calculating probability,” Aberegg says. “As a result, they commonly miss opportunities to make better treatment decisions.”
Overall, 78% of the physicians who evaluated one of three scenarios in the survey estimated that the probability of the desired outcome would be greater than the likelihood of the two individual events required for it to occur. This is a mathematical impossibility, Aberegg says. “There are enormous opportunities in medical education to improve the curriculum in terms of teaching the importance of probability in medical settings,” Aberegg says. “Numbers are the most reliable source of correct decisions in medicine.”