Should medical training be something we “survive”?

During the second world war, planes would return home with bullet holes in their metalwork. The US military thought, logically, that the way to protect these planes during their next flights was to reinforce the areas that had been hit. Abraham Wald pointed out, however, that these planes had survived enemy fire and made it home. Therefore, the areas of direct harm were survivable. The areas that hadn’t been hit likely represented where other planes had been hit and not made it home. So those were the areas that should be reinforced. Welcome to the concept of survivorship bias.

All of us have a survivorship bias when it comes to how we were trained, or are being trained, in medicine. We made it through our training (at least, thus …