Doctors vs. Pilots

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Those are indeed wise words, but what we are discussing here is not the
object of healthcare or aviation (namely the patients or the aeroplanes) but
the subjects in them (namely doctors and pilots).

We are all human and as such the "rules" that govern our performance are the
same. And they have looked at them and investigated them a  whole lot more
than we have, regardless of what their motivation for doing so is...

The rules of human limitations and exhaustion apply to everyone regardless
of what they do (allowing, of course, for interpersonal variability), but
not every profession is life-critical to the point where poor performance
may lead to serious injury or death.

I think we may be digressing a bit from the original thread, and it seems to
me that you and I agree more than we disagree on this issue.

Andre

2009/5/8 Doc Holiday drydok at hotmail.com

> --> That they (and other money-making businesses) have the funds to study
> and publish on performance, efficiency and human factors is accepted. But
> their INDUSTRY does have so many conveniently numerical and finite concepts
> to evaluate and plot on charts. They have components which their computers
> can trace throughout their lives and exclude out of the analysis. They have
> so many other factors which they can exclude from confounding their results.
> So they SHOULD have stuff to publish.
>
>
>
> But at the end of it all, 99.9% of the outcomes they analyse are objects
> and numerical measures, even when they do look at the effects of human
> factors on these. That's the thing with INDUSTRY - objects mean a lot to it.
> Medicine and surgery are much more about concepts one cannot measure
> accurately with numbers. So much of what we do or the pathologies we see are
> not predicted by formulae.
>
>
>
> If you have a machine, with a finite number of components which YOU have
> made and put into it. Which are in most cases in a fit condition to fly and
> proven/tested to show this. Which are placed where they are exactly as per
> plan and monitored by computers as of the instant they are installed. Which
> are given a pre-determined load to carry on a path charted with excellent
> meteorological predictions and evidence from another flight which has just
> recently crossed the same bit of sky. etc. etc. etc. THEN, perhaps, you have
> eliminated enough performance variables to allow you to get some statistical
> measure of how the human factors affect this performance. Then also you may
> be able to more easily change pilots mid-flight.
>
>
>
> In much the same way, if we had patients "built" out of pre-tested
> components, loaded mostly with pre-determined loads, allowed to perform
> within specified parameters, connected to computers and continuously
> monitored from birth right through to their current illness, etc. etc. etc.
> - THEN we could also use such patients to research the effect of changing
> surgeon training hours, without confounding variables, AND publish it...
>
>
>
> See what you've done!
>
> You've made me do the airline metaphor things again! I hate it...
>
>
>
> And, as you have probably guessed, I am basing my opinion not on ignorance
> of airline research, but on having spent much professional time in the past
> on attempting to "copy" some of their "stuff" into medicine and being paid
> to do so...
>
>

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