I know a surgeon with a substantial rate of spectacular failure and a very bad reputation. But most of the time, outcomes are excellent. Is that a bad surgeon on average? No idea. And Im in the OR every day.
I assume the general silent belief would be that your guy with the spectacular failure is some kind of "take the tough cases" dude?
By the way, when I was much younger (maybe 10-15 years ago), I recall my dad coming back from an AO Foundation conference where there was a talk about some particular procedure in some Scandinavian country where the range of outcome quality was so high for a particular non-emergency THR/TKR or something like that and so they shut down the procedure in the remote hospitals and centralized it in a few (3?) tertiary healthcare centres. Do you recall something like that? I have this memory in my head but I can't find the original material. The story is so good: EBM driving patient outcomes; but I can't find it so I don't share it and I would like very much to, if it is true.
No, the silent belief is that he's the worst surgeon we have.
> they shut down the procedure in the remote hospitals and centralized it in a few (3?) tertiary healthcare centres. Do you recall something like that?
That's become an extremely common strategy for specialized surgery throughout Europe.
Haha, classic! I love it! I was honestly a little worried of offending you if he was a friend.
> That's become an extremely common strategy for specialized surgery throughout Europe.
There we go. Fine, I'll just go look it up.
I'll let you make some quick inferences using this video https://www.nejm.org/do/10.1056/NEJMdo004274/full/?requestTy... from this paper https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1300625
Crucially, if you can get someone to hide which surgeon is skillful and which one is not and view the video and judge for yourself, you might be surprised at your skill in differentiation. In my experience, my friends have 100% guessed which surgeon is better correctly. So it is possible that this is Sorites-style.