[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

For that matter, malpractice suits seem like a uniquely US phenomenon.

They still happen here in Scandinavia, but they're fairly rare.

The weird thing is most doctors are not trained to be scientists, but many of them are expected to do science.

There are ways to punish "malpractice" that aren't lawsuits, on many different levels, so I think the status quo argument still holds.

I would guess that, prior to malpractice suits, the main threat to a doctor was a bad reputation, spread by word of mouth among patients. This still provides an incentive to do nothing too weird, but now "weird" means "weird as judged by patients and their loved ones."

Would this have made for more innovation or less? It's not clear to me. On the one hand, patients had less experience in medical matters than doctors, so things that other doctors might have considered normal would have seemed weird to the patients. This might have encouraged doctors to be even more conservative than their peers would allow. Another doctor might say, "Yeah, that's how this rare condition is treated, on those few occasions when it is treated." But the patient hasn't heard of those "few occasions", and so the treatment will just seem weird. If the treatment fails, surviving loved ones might spread rumors about how the doctor killed the patient with weird treatments.

On the other hand, patients would probably often defer to the authority of their doctors. Maybe the patient would think, "Well, this does seem a little weird. But doctors often do things that seem a little weird. I'll trust him if he tells me that it's not too weird." In that case, a doctor might be able to get away with weirder treatments than his peers would allow, because patients, unlike other doctors, wouldn't feel comfortable gainsaying him, even if things didn't work out.

I don't think so, that would have been made clearer, but let's assume it was:

He mixed some normal stool with chocolate milk and fed it to the lady.

This is not how it's done, they use a tube. Stool transplant is usually the last option when nothing else works, the patient is desperate and might die without treatment.

The linked study suggests stool transplant is more effective than antibiotics. This doesn't necessarily mean that antibiotics shouldn't be tried first, as they are simpler to administer and more readily available.

Because punishment tends to immediately terminate the punished behavior, while not preventing it in the long run, punishment reinforces the punisher. The person doing the punishment is an agent under conditioning as well, but most folks fail to notice this.

Punishment generally follows exceptionally bad behavior, exceptional behavior is, obviously, exceptional, so punishment would be expected to be followed by behavior which is not exceptionally bad just because of regression to the mean

I don't think treating human behavior as a simple random variable is a good model. See here for a better model.

No, the studies I'm aware of did not research what immediate benefits might be available, they were just researching whether children who received corporal punishment were more likely to express violence, and found that this was the case. That corporal punishment might be effective in the short term is my own presumption based on the fact that it shows effectiveness in controlling crime when used as a legal punishment against adults.