Dunning and Krueger Strike Again

I'm finally going to discuss something I'm halfway competent at! And I’m discussing being halfway competent!

Last year I saw an article about Chiropractors trying to get approved as primary medical practitioners, like Physicians and Nurse Practitioners. I don't remember exactly where it was.

In the article a Chiropractor was quoted saying that they have a very good medical education... over a thousand hours.

I can't really evaluate their program qualitatively, but to some degree a quantitative comparison could work instead, just as a rough guess. My first thought when I saw that number is, that's eight around what I've got. I'm an EMT-2, Intermediate, and my course was right around a thousand hours.

Med school is probably closer to ten thousand hours, an order of magnitude up. Probably. I'm not exactly sure, since they don't seem to sleep much. With a tenth of the training I can hardly begin to comprehend how they assess their patients and make their decisions.

I was reminded of this today when I saw an article in the Vancouver Sun about ambulance wait times. In it the Surrey fire chief was quoted as saying that getting advanced life support faster would probably be good, but getting basic life support - a "transport ambulance" - doesn't make as much difference, because firefighters do many of the same things.

Now, I was a firefighter before I started doing this, so I remember a little of the medical training. We got one week. 40 hours. 1/25th the amount as the EMT-2s.

That chief just ran up against the Dunning-Krueger effect... he's so ignorant he doesn't even realise how little he knows. He would need six months to fill that gap in his knowledge... or else he could look at the numbers and realize that an order of magnitude difference is going to mean making decisions he can't comprehend and providing treatments he's never heard of and asking questions he could never have predicted.

Sometimes it's worth thinking about just how much you don't know.