And sometimes you don't need an algorithm to tell you your knee is jacked.
The Ottawa Knee Rules are fantastic. They’re a list of five simple tests to do on someone with a knee injury that identifies the need for an x-ray. You’ve fallen and whacked your knee, and it hurts like stink. If any of the following are true, you probably have a fracture and need an x-ray: You’re older than 55, your kneecap (and nothing else) hurts to touch, the top of your fibula (one of those lower leg bones) hurts, you can’t bend your knee to 90 degrees, or you can’t bear weight on the leg for four steps. The Ottawa Knee Rules have been tested to show 100% sensitivity (OH GROSS STATISTICS MAKE IT STOP), meaning that 100% of the people it identifies as needing an x-ray due to a possible fracture really do actually have a fracture.
Medicine loves a good algorithm. And good medicine can combine algorithms to solve the problem at hand using the same methods and hopefully yielding the same results each time. In a moment of post-West coast playoff game brain fog, I began to wonder why you couldn’t apply an algorithm to supplemental discipline, as opposed to the current method of whatever the hell it is they’re using (Alchemy? Dice? Majority vote in a room full of toddlers?).
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