>>One of the fist things they tell you in medical school is that by the time you graduate everything you've learned will be obsolete. Some doctors stay up on things and learn new stuff -- some do not. That is one primary thing I look for in a doctor.
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>They said the same thing to programmers... and it turned out to be quite false. Things just came into fashion and dropped out of it, or old wine came in new bottles, but pretty much since mid nineties I think we had perhaps a dozen really new things to learn, and a dozen to forget.
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>As for medicine, they're fixing the same model for a few millennia. We at least get new motherboards and processors every few years.

Actually there have been some real advances in my lifetime.

I was around when people got polio.
Here in my senior community there are dozens of people walking around on artificial hips and knees who a few decades ago would have been on crutches or in wheel chairs.
An ophthalmologist college friend of mine was on the leading edge of laser eye surgery - which has brought clear vision to millions who would not have had it.
I myself have benefited from heart surgery that has saved countless lives that would have been lost before the technique was developed.

A problem here is that many of these advances can't benefit millions of people because they can't afford them.
Another problem is that our for-profit health-care system has perverse incentives and expensive procedures are often prescribed when something simpler would have been OK.