Should older doctors be examined, tested or forced to retire?

My doctor probably  hadn't read a single stroke research article since he graduated from medical school, maybe 30 years prior.
I would say yes, except it has nothing to do with being old, it has to do with keeping up with research. Your stroke hospital should have goals and objectives for that for their doctors and therapists.  Fireable for cause for not keeping up. I should never know more than any stroke doctor out there. Every single one should be able to run rings around me.
https://www.mdlinx.com/family-medicine/top-medical-news/article/2017/08/14/7305499?

Reuters Health News

At 81, Dr. Frank Stockdale continues to see breast cancer patients and believes he offers them the wisdom and knowledge from his more than 50 years of oncology practice.
But a new review of the literature on aging physicians questions the competency to practice of older physicians like Stockdale. The report in JAMA Surgery, online July 19, recommends that healthcare organizations develop protocols for testing doctors of a certain–though undetermined–age for health and competence.
“This is clearly a discriminatory policy if you pick an age to test,” said Stockdale, professor, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, who was not involved in the review.
Lead author Dr. E. Patchen Dellinger, professor of surgery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, does not know what age is the right age to begin testing doctors, he said. But the 73–year–old surgeon believes he and other doctors should willingly submit to physical examinations and cognitive testing. And he has.
The medical community has grappled with the question of whether to test aging physicians, particularly surgeons, for two decades, if not longer. But the graying of the nation’s physicians has energized the debate over their health and competence.
During the past four decades, the number of practicing US doctors who were at least 65 years old more than quadrupled. By 2015, nearly one in four physicians were 65 or older, the authors write.
Dr. Paul Schenarts, a trauma surgeon and professor, University of Nebraska College of Medicine, Omaha, NB, agrees with the authors of the review that a program for testing aging physicians should be implemented.
“Something new and different should be done,” Schenarts, who was not involved with the review, said in an email. “It is a well–known paradox that the surgeon with the greatest experience may be the one putting patients at the greatest risk.”
Though federal law prohibits age discrimination, commercial pilots are required to retire before 65, and starting at 40, they must submit to more–frequent medical examinations than younger pilots.
Previous studies of a possible link between doctors’ ages and clinical performance found mixed results. While some showed patients more likely to die from cardiovascular procedures performed by older surgeons, others showed patients were more vulnerable at the hands of younger surgeons.
Using a cognition test called a MicroCog, one prior study examined doctors alongside people outside the profession. Doctors scored better than others, but cognition scores for everyone in the study declined with age. Researchers found significant variability in older physicians’ scores, with some demonstrating fully intact cognitive ability and others showing dramatic declines.
Stockdale discounted the MicroCog as incapable of judging a physician’s ability to practice and said he knew of no test that could appropriately examine a doctor’s cognitive ability to practice medicine.
“The major problem is what is the test for cognition,” he said. “You have to have an instrument that’s been shown to correlate with our work task.”
In 2012, Stanford, where Stockdale practices, proposed cognitive testing for doctors 74.5 years and older. Stockdale protested the policy, which was tabled.
But that doesn’t mean Stanford isn’t monitoring its physicians, he said. They, along with physicians in hospitals throughout the nation, are evaluated every 6 to 9 months and constantly subjected to the scrutiny of their coworkers, patients and oversight committees, he said.
“If If I were demented, I can tell you I’d last about a week before every nurse and medical student noticed,” Stockdale said.
“Physicians of all ages are injuring patients,” he said. “We should be testing everybody at all ages for their competence. It shouldn’t be because you’re 65.”