On the other hand, without some kind of prompting, many doctors tend to narrowly focus on reaching a firm diagnosis at the expense of maximizing benefit/minimizing risk to the patient.
There are certainly different schools of thought possible on how much time to invest in disease identification before going for a treatment, but can you explain your evidence for why you think most doctors tend to err on the side of over-caution?
Medicine does include the ideas of "empirical treatment" and "empirical diagnosis". Empirical treatment is when eg a doctor can't figure out exactly what a disease is, but it looks bacterial, so ey'll throw some common antibiotics at it and see if it works. Empirical diagnosis is when a doctor i...
A feature in Scientific American magazine casts some light on the troubled state of modern medicine.
Health Care Myth Busters: Is There a High Degree of Scientific Certainty in Modern Medicine?
Short excerpt:
Scientific American often gates its online articles after some time has passed, so I don't know how long it will be available.