From Grok: “Survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when we focus only on the “survivors” (the successful people, things, or outcomes that made it through a selection process) while ignoring those that didn’t survive or weren’t visible. This leads to overly optimistic or skewed conclusions because the full picture is incomplete.”
Plus from Wiki: “It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just a coincidence, as in correlation “proves” causality.”
The only way to measure outcomes is to measure them, and follow-ups improve outcomes, but be careful in ascribing certain successes to particular processes and procedures. I gave this tooth a poor long term prognosis, and yet here we are 8 years down the road and it’s looking good. Meanwhile, on the same patient, I’ve treated 8 other teeth since. So, low prognosis & high hostility, successful outcome, so far. Through that lens it’s difficult to say that this isn’t a gold standard of management. Of course there are clinicians that can post similar cases from their own stream using plastic which is undoubtedly easier to do. So, here I’m left with “is it worth the considerable extra effort to treat with silver” or do the easier single pour?
So, when this patient walks in with cancer, can’t get teeth out, comorbidities yada, yada, yada. Clearly a high hostility index. What do we do? There’s always uncertainty, but in the most hostile environments this kind of management works best most of the time. That’s unfortunate for me, because this takes significantly more time and effort. Thank God for the assistant side, without it, this is simply not feasible. Thus the recall woes. All three required custom resin matrices like pictured below.
