Also, have you looked at studies examining how much different doctors agree with each other about same patients

But they're a powerful entrenched interest, therefore their mistakes are a-ok.

I used to work for a company that made a machine that scanned pap smear slides for cancer, so I saw some of the data you describe.

In this case, the problem wasn't as much in the inter observer rates as the false negative rates. A significant fraction of slides with abnormalities, as detected by exhaustive examination by experts, were missed by the large commercial processing centers.

Ladies, have your pap smears done at clinics associated with med schools. I think their false negative rate was approaching an order of magnitude better than HMO Lab Inc.

Our magic machine, of course, was much better than HMO Lab Inc. But the FDA "protected" women from more accurate pap smear diagnoses by a post data look at one rare diagnostic category with a handful of samples, where the detection rate was poor. Horrible decision theory, and a failure to follow even the flawed hypothesis testing that they purport to use.

But they've got the guns, so fuck us.