From Suneel (brother of Sanjay) Gupta’s Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You:
Apply the following quotation to why doctors don’t want to make the call:
If the fear of betting on the wrong idea is twice as powerful as the pleasure of betting on the right idea, then we can’t neutralize the fear of losing with the pleasure of winning. We can only neutralize the fear of losing with…the fear of losing. Enter FOMO, the fear of missing out. For backers, the only thing equally powerful to missing is…missing out.
Gupta goes on to discuss how potential backers initially too scared to be the first investor eventually pile on to avoid missing out on rare unicorns.
The fear of betting on the wrong idea in medicine manifests through overtesting and hedging. More than our desire to be right, we really don’t want to be wrong. But we can’t use the usual FOMO to our advantage, because medicine isn’t about making pitches or raising money but about directly helping individual people.
We don’t want to miss anything and so are forced to entertain everything, even if that means everyone in the ED gets a CT scan or a radiologist gives an impression a mile long with the words “cannot be excluded” featured prominently next to something extremely scary.
The true solution is this: we need to disentangle the outcome from the process. You can have good outcomes from bad decisions (dumb luck) or you can have bad outcomes after good decisions (bad luck). Luck and uncertainty are part of life, and they’re a big part of medicine. We should expect some bad outcomes even when doing the right thing, and we shouldn’t forget that overtesting and overdiagnosis have their own costs, risks, and harms. Passing the buck to the future doesn’t mean it won’t be paid.
By not making the call, we are making a decision: a decision to abdicate the diagnostic yield of an encounter or examination.
There are absolutely times when uncertainly is prudent. There are true “differential” cases. But the FOMO of diagnostic medicine should be passing up an opportunity to clearly define the next steps in a patient’s care.
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