In discussing a complex medical case, my friend Tom, a thoughtful physician, said this very thing, noting that it had become something of an au courant phrase in his department. "I didn't come up with it," Tom said, "but it's often what doctors should do." So, curious about where it came from, I just googled and discovered a book by Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff with precisely that title.
Weisbord and Janoff, you may recall, developed Future Search, a meeting methodology that allows large numbers of people to imagine a common future. If you haven't experienced it, try to - fascinating approach that we first experienced at Digital Equipment Corporation (RIP--no reflection on the power of the method!).
So back to medicine, complex cases, and the physician desire to intervene. Often, Tom said, the best approach is to do nothing other than wait. Expertise, of course, is the determinant in knowing when to do that, but, in my experience, age is not necessarily the factor that indicates whether a doctor will or will not recommend intervention. There's some element of wisdom and common sense here as well.
