I imagine doctors would gladly trade this maturity to the luxury software engineers have: having build everything themselves. Alas, a lot in modern medicine is

I imagine doctors would gladly trade this maturity to the luxury software engineers have: having build everything themselves. Alas, a lot in modern medicine is not really much better than putting leeches, hence the articles "X is good for your health" and then two weeks later "or maybe not". You can compare medics to a bunch of programmers which have to maintain billions copies of self-replicating and self-modifying program with billions year old legacy code. No source code is available, only obsfucated fragments without clear understanding which bits are significant and which just junk. Disassembly is hard, and no debug is possible, so the only way to figure out how the system works is try to modify a bit and look how the output changes. Some defects manifest quite often and there are few bugfixes ready, but how they work and what side-effects they have is not always clear. Systems are very fragile and must be treated very carefully in order to avoid fatal crash. Hence the "maturity" of the field — one has to be very careful when dealing with the staff not fully understood.