No, you can't interpret that from what I wrote. If you check again I didn't say his doctor told him he had 8 months to live. He read literature on his own and his heart most likely skipped a beat when he read the median. The whole thing probably didn't last more than a couple seconds and that inspired his article.

If you check the first reference.

He didn't mention what prognosis his doctor gave him. Just that she didn't give him literature to read.
Most medical studies have a confidence interval and statistical significance in them. Even at the time of his diagnosis 1982, is fairly probable his doctors had to use C.I.

Most likely what happened, since I can't find another recorded mention of what happened with his doctor, she just underestimated him. Even if she had given him a risk profile analysis, like the one he did on its own, that is not a guarantee of anything. We can now see the right thing, but that's mostly survivorship bias.

Indeed, the medical training on statistics is lacking, but that's true of most fields where their participants are not actively involved in research. Since the apparition and popularization of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) Giving such information to patients is routine and most of the population is actually more troubled by it than relieved.