Blinding doesn't mean not observing patients, it has a much more specific meaning than that. Blinding is used where it can be used.
I can cross the street with a blindfold. That doesn't mean that's a good idea.
The general idea of blinding in medical science is that on average the human pattern matching ability produces more harm than good. Good medical treatment in the evidence-based paradigm is supposed to be treatment by the book.
People do things like putting box-plots in their scientific papers instead of providing plots of raw data to hide the messiness of real world data from their eyes. That happens in a culture that values blindness.
That culture of blindness leads to many unknowns unknowns that mess with your process in complex ways.
There are many assumption about how learning and how knowledge work that are just assumed to be true.
One example is measure lung function. I have seen papers on Asthma medication that use FEV1 as metric of success. I have measured FEV1 daily for over a year and one day before I got the flu I felt restricted breathing. My FEV1 was still at the normal value.
That's a reference experience that increases my knowledge about the subject. Involved interaction with the subject matter leads to knowledge. You don't get reference experiences by reading journal papers and text books. You usually also don't learn new phenomenological primitives that way.
Oscar Wilde wrote: "Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." "Nothing" might be an exaggeration but certain knowledge is just really really hard to transfer. But you can set up conditions that are conductive to learning.
You're making sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up.
Are you arguing that professors are using teaching methods for whom they have published evidence that those teaching methods work?
This is strictly illegal in many (most?) countries.
Today yes. 20 years ago no. Today Big Pharma can't bribe as much doctors anymore, their business model is in crisis and they have to lay of a lot of workers. Of course it might just be correlation and no causation between the separate observations.
I have seen papers on Asthma medication that use FEV1 as metric of success. I have measured FEV1 daily for over a year and one day before I got the flu I felt restricted breathing. My FEV1 was still at the normal value.
A measure that is wrong in one particular case may still be the best measure available on a statistical level. I highly doubt that doctors would get better ideas of which therapies are good if they discarded this measure and instead used "does the patient claim to feel restricted breathing".
Furthermore, you haven't convinced me...
TL;DR: There is probably some costly problem in your life right now that you are not even aware of. It is not that you are procrastinating on solving it. Rather, this problem has gradually blended into your environment, sinking beneath your conscious awareness to the degree that you fail to recognize it as a problem in the first place.
This post is partially an elaboration on Ugh fields, but there are some decisive differences I want to develop. Let me begin with an anecdote:
For about two years I've had a periodic pain in my right thigh. Gradually, it became worse. At one point I actually had a sort of spasm. Then the pain went away for a few weeks, then it came back, and so forth. All the while I rationalized it as something harmless: "It will probably just go away soon," I would think, or "It only inhibits my mobility sometimes." Occasionally I would consider seeking medical help, but I couldn't muster the energy, as though some activation threshold wasn't being reached. In fact, the very promise that I could get medical help whenever convenient served to further diminish any sense of urgency. Even if the pain was sometimes debilitating, I did not perceive it as a problem needing to be solved. Gradually, I came to view it as just an unfortunate and inevitable part of existence.
Last Monday, after hardly being able to walk due to crippling pain, I finally became aware that "Wow, this really sucks and I should fix it." That evening I finally visited a chiropractor, who proceeded to get medieval on my femur (imagine having a sprained ankle, then imagine a grown man jumping on top of it). Had I classified this as a problem-needing-to-be-solved a few months earlier, my treatment period would probably be days instead of weeks.
Simply, I think this situation is of a more general form:
You have some inefficiency or agitation in your life. This could be solved very easily, but because it is perceived as harmless, no such attempt is made. Over time your tolerance for it increases, even if the problem is worsening (Bonus points for attempts at rationalizing it). This may be due to something like the peak-end rule, as the problem doesn't cause any dramatic peaks that stick out in your memory, just a dull pain underlying your experience. Even if the problem substantially lowers utility, your satisficing lizard brain remains apathetic, until the last moment, when the damage passes a certain threshold and you're jolted into action.
While similar to procrastination and akrasia, this does not involve you going against your better judgement. Instead, you don't have a better judgement, due to the blinding effects of the problem.
Possible Solutions:
I didn't solve my problem in a clever way, but I've begun employing some "early warning" techniques to prevent future incidents. The key is to become aware of the worsening inefficiency before you're forced to resort to damage control.