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> The doctor helping the patient really "saves" the patient life and the life of people in his family every time he/she helps. That's not measurable with QALYs the way it's done in the article,

No, this is literally what QALY are for - measuring the impact of an improvement at someones life.



Right. For readers not familiar with this topic, QALYs are to be contrasted with disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), which are less holistic (but also less subjective).


No, QALY was actually not designed to be used the way the article is using it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

"It is used in assessing the value for money of a medical intervention"

not to compare the doctors "impact" to other occupations "impact" which is the implicit goal of the article and the explicit of the site:

https://80000hours.org/2015/07/if-you-want-to-save-lives-sho...

"If you want to save lives, should you study medicine? Probably not."


And why would it be good for comparing money efficiency and not life choice efficiency?




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