Doc, why are you uncertain?
I hope you enjoyed the meme, The one about a few graduate students who grew in confidence as they developed exposure to a subject maybe you read the paper like I did. If you skipped it and just laughed fair.
If you didn't read the paper they didn't draw this graph but the title "Unskilled and Unaware" makes for good memes. 20 years into my career I am a bit afraid of people who know for certain.
I prefer those who are uncertain and are even willing to present a falsifiable position, that can truly be proven wrong. If they give reasonable numeric support of their position they may have been Presbyterian or at least read about Bayes Theorem. 0-1 would be the range. Presented like 0.1 to 0.9 10% to 90% or 0.5 (50/50).
If you don't understand what I mean look up ultracreapidarian. If they present a falsifiable theory we are talking about the pursuit of knowledge. If it isn't falsifiable it is a belief. I have some beliefs but not many. I think about the lines on a much longer experience curve maybe decades long, Socrates described knowledge as a sphere; the things in the sphere you know, the edge is the things you don't know, and things outside the sphere you don't know you don't know (unknown, unknowns D.J. Rumsfeld). If you made that a graph I know the evidence and the red line is my familiarity with the evidence. I know the star at the bottom of the curve the "valley of despair" for emergency medicine exposes 2.8% which is the number of reproducible studies that have been performed in emergency medicine. Statistical significance does not yield reliability or reproducability.
Medicine aims for decent care but we settle for the standard of care. Well, that is fuzzy, I give you the blue line which is DECENT bog standard, average boring care. That isn't achievable everywhere but most of the developed world has a chance. The top orange line is the leading best evidence chasing the new and exciting advances. The bottom orange line is practising to the last worst outcome or "defensive medicine". The extremes are expensive and expose people to great risk and harm.
If I have a hope as a mid-career physician it is to be confidently uncertain. I try to give my patients and the doctors, students and nurses I teach a chance to be exposed to less harm. Not to look busy doing something. When I am uncertain and need a test to develop more certainty. The evidence isn't certain why should I be.
When you get to the rising slope on the red line and see confidence increase from my two-decade-long career into the valley of despair. Why do you do it? What do you do? How can you keep going? Well, you keep going because we should be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable. I think I can provide decent care the hope is to do it with less effort, more humour and less testing. To become enigmatically pragmatic.
When I am asked by patients I just met how do you know so much about this disease that fits me perfectly that I have never heard of and why are you so certain? I reply "I knew you were coming, I just didn't know your name."