Charlotte Blease

But what's really interesting is the older doctors get, and we do have an ageing medical profession, about a third of doctors in Europe are over 55 years old.

What that means is that they tend to be, older doctors are more confident in their decisions, but they're less likely to be accurate.

Is that right?

Yes, and that's because of the evidence base.

The evidence base in medicine tends to be more or less fixed at the time at which you graduate.

So the greater the distance there is from your medical education, and again, that reflects the challenges of keeping up to date with medical information, you have quite serious knowledge deficits.

They just don't have time to do it.

Now, that's not sort of a blanket assumption in terms of, you know, you can keep up to date in certain ways.

But across the board, you will not be able to update your entire corpus of medical knowledge to keep track of things.

the evidence as it's changing and accumulating.

And medical evidence does change.

There's a phenomenon known as medical reversals, meaning that the evidence for a particular therapeutic may change so that it's actually discovered

not to be useful or in some cases harmful.

Yes.

Yes, but a large part of what doctors do is instinctual as well.

And when we were talking about keeping up to date, you know, in the old days, if you went to a doctor, they might have taken an encyclopedia or some sort of a medical textbook to flick through it.

Nowadays, of course, they do use the Internet.

They will use Google.

And clinical decision support tools, which have been designed for medical use, it should be said, those are sort of computer tools that give information that is supposed to be up to date, are very poorly used by doctors.

Well, this is where we're getting into interesting territory because then, as you say, yes, AI in the form of these large language model chatbots is incredibly impressive.