>>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>
>I have a cousin who wouldn't be alive if she'd been born a few years earlier. She was born with mistakes in her urinary system. In one of those "you wouldn't believe this in a novel" coincidences, her father's law partner had a brother who was pioneering new surgery for this particular condition. She was an early patient, had a bunch of surgeries as a child, and is now in her 60's. Her parents were originally told she wouldn't live past (I think it was) 50.
>
>Tamar

Great. I hope she continues to defy the odds.

On the flip side, my father died in his forties of Tuberculosis,
He and thousands like him would probably have survived a few decades later.

The advances during the past several decades have been stunning.