The phone rang this morning, and when I picked it up, no one was on the other end. It must have been someone who dialed a wrong number. There seems to be many wrong number calls.
When you think about it, though, are there a lot of wrong number calls? There’s some 300,000,000 million Americans making calls every day, perhaps 3,000,000,000 billion calls being made each day, and despite all that potential for wrong numbers, it is truly extraordinary how few wrong number calls we get.
We might notice the wrong number calls we get, but generally, we don’t take time to think about or notice the other 10 trillion (yes, trillion!) calls each year that don’t result in us receiving a wrong number call.
So often, rare negative events capture our attention, while we are completely oblivious to all the normal, commonplace events that aren’t immediately apparent. Of course, it is great that we can tune out the normal; otherwise it would inundate us. But let’s be careful not to draw our conclusions from just the negative events.
For example, we will only see treatment failures referred from primary care providers. We will only see unhappy patients who have left our colleagues’ practices to see us. Surgeons will only see our surgical failures, and not our many successes. It is too easy to be misled by our experience. Be on the lookout for what you don’t see before making conclusions based on what you do see.
Steven R. Feldman, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Editor
Dr Feldman is with the Center for Dermatology Research and the Departments of Dermatology, Pathology, and Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC.
The phone rang this morning, and when I picked it up, no one was on the other end. It must have been someone who dialed a wrong number. There seems to be many wrong number calls.
When you think about it, though, are there a lot of wrong number calls? There’s some 300,000,000 million Americans making calls every day, perhaps 3,000,000,000 billion calls being made each day, and despite all that potential for wrong numbers, it is truly extraordinary how few wrong number calls we get.
We might notice the wrong number calls we get, but generally, we don’t take time to think about or notice the other 10 trillion (yes, trillion!) calls each year that don’t result in us receiving a wrong number call.
So often, rare negative events capture our attention, while we are completely oblivious to all the normal, commonplace events that aren’t immediately apparent. Of course, it is great that we can tune out the normal; otherwise it would inundate us. But let’s be careful not to draw our conclusions from just the negative events.
For example, we will only see treatment failures referred from primary care providers. We will only see unhappy patients who have left our colleagues’ practices to see us. Surgeons will only see our surgical failures, and not our many successes. It is too easy to be misled by our experience. Be on the lookout for what you don’t see before making conclusions based on what you do see.
Steven R. Feldman, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Editor
Dr Feldman is with the Center for Dermatology Research and the Departments of Dermatology, Pathology, and Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC.
The phone rang this morning, and when I picked it up, no one was on the other end. It must have been someone who dialed a wrong number. There seems to be many wrong number calls.
When you think about it, though, are there a lot of wrong number calls? There’s some 300,000,000 million Americans making calls every day, perhaps 3,000,000,000 billion calls being made each day, and despite all that potential for wrong numbers, it is truly extraordinary how few wrong number calls we get.
We might notice the wrong number calls we get, but generally, we don’t take time to think about or notice the other 10 trillion (yes, trillion!) calls each year that don’t result in us receiving a wrong number call.
So often, rare negative events capture our attention, while we are completely oblivious to all the normal, commonplace events that aren’t immediately apparent. Of course, it is great that we can tune out the normal; otherwise it would inundate us. But let’s be careful not to draw our conclusions from just the negative events.
For example, we will only see treatment failures referred from primary care providers. We will only see unhappy patients who have left our colleagues’ practices to see us. Surgeons will only see our surgical failures, and not our many successes. It is too easy to be misled by our experience. Be on the lookout for what you don’t see before making conclusions based on what you do see.
Steven R. Feldman, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Editor
Dr Feldman is with the Center for Dermatology Research and the Departments of Dermatology, Pathology, and Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC.
