Historically doctors have been the most educated people. Not many people went to Uni and very few had a Masters. Doctors had 5-7 years of rigorous education and

Historically doctors have been the most educated people. Not many people went to Uni and very few had a Masters. Doctors had 5-7 years of rigorous education and did quite a bit of lifelong learning, including following scientific research. To most people, they were by far the most educated person they interacted with. Today, a lot of people have degrees and even the ones who don't have the opportunity to engage with a lot of self education through the internet, a lot of it informal (like HN). Doctors are also more knowledgable than they were but the gap has narrowed. The difference between doctors and the median (or 75 percentile) person has narrowed. Obviously, they still know a helva lot more about medicine, especially in their specialization but when it comes to Science as a discipline or statistics/math/etc., they aren't that far ahead of the pack. *BTW, oncologists are probably the most versed in science, research methodology & statistics because they participate in a lot of research and choosing a course of treatment may be a choice between treatments based of studies with samples of insufficient size or duration to make absolute statements about. One study follows remission rates of patients segmented by the presence of specific genes in the cancer. Another remission rates for a slightly modified treatment and slightly different segmentation. etc. Anyway, I don't think cases is irrelevant or incorrect thing to look at here. The number of cases is the number of people that need to be treated. If you are talking about prevention, the number of cases is a relevant indicator of success.