Complications related to viral hepatitis, alcohol-related and non-alcoholic liver disease, are the main reason for seeking gastroenterologists and hepatologists advice. In addition, hepatocellular carcinoma often arise on the ground of hepatitis, representing the fifth most common cancer in men and the ninth in women. In 2015, the World Health Organization estimated that 325 million people were living with chronic hepatitis infections (hepatitis B or C) worldwide and that globally, 1.34 million people died of viral in 2015.
In front of this global health problem, gastroenterologists, hepatologists and hepato-biliary-pancreatic (HBP) surgeons, are daily involved in the clinical routine in taking difficult clinical decisions. As Sir William Osler quoted: “medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability” and no doctor returns home from a busy day at the hospital without the nagging feeling that some of his/her diagnoses may turn out to be wrong, or some treatments may not lead to the expected cure. Probability is a recurring theme in medical practice and the ability of dealing with risk and uncertainty can be elicited through a special kind of intelligence. In 2012, The UK psychologist Dylan Evans defined it as “risk-intelligence” that is "a special kind of intelligence for thinking about risk and uncertainty", at the core of which is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately.
Consequently, doctors are routinely asked to make predictions, and their predictions would lead to a consistent payoff when regarding a patient’s life. At the basis of “wise” medical decisions, physician’s experience surely plays a vital role. However, doctors can assume that their competency in a given area can be significantly higher than it really is. Such illusory superiority, is described as the Dunning – Kruger effect, a meta-cognitive bias leading to a discrepancy between the way people actually perform and the way they perceive their own performance level. The concept of “risk-intelligence” relies on the confidence that each subject has with their own knowledge, thus returning accurate probability estimates, and a “wise” doctor should be aware that he/she do not known, thus, returning high risk-intelligence.
To date, little is known about risk-intelligence and the Dunning – Kruger effect between doctors, and, especially, among hepatologists, a specialty strongly involved in important clinical decisions. With this aim we conducted a survey to test how risk-intelligence affects medical decision making in this particular clinical setting and whether the Dunning – Kruger bias can effectively affect these physicians.
If you are a gastroenterologist, hepatologist or HBP surgeon please help us in investigate this issue by completing the following survey:
https://goo.gl/forms/nMNk3KoaLZzdeAXG3
Thank!
(I hope you will find the correct answers in the appendix section of the manuscript we are writing!)
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Chemistry
- Pharmacology
- Medical Pharmacology
- Clinical Pharmacology