In the modern day, a lot of people with a lot of education will scoff at anything that hasn't been produced by science, or even anything that simply wasn't taught to them in medical school. Meanwhile, the medical system is full of inefficiencies and outdated practices because of politics and resistance to accepting or learning newer scientific findings. Worthwhile questions about simple ways to improve things often go unanswered, because nobody has been able or willing to do a large, randomized trial about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17952107
Looking back I could have talked about Zika here. How many childhood viruses are we sure don't cause down-the-road issues like cancer? Most of the time when you get a random virus, the doctor has no clue which one it is and doesn't test to find out. I can remember being told by nurses at the school "there's a virus going around," and that's all we knew: there was some virus, and everyone was getting it. We just assume that these things are harmless and irrelevant once you recover from them.
So much in medical diagnosis is just a very coarse decision tree and it is uneconomical to investigate every sickness.
Imagine doctors having more time per patient. Imagine many diseases detected before there are symptoms.
I got carried away here, but medicine looks so much more promising then CS sometimes.
Plus, when you write software that disrupts an industry, your employees are still software developers who work and function like software developers. If you want to change healthcare, you need to change how the doctors operate.
That's called Fee-For-Service (FFS) and is there is active effort to replace it with quality-based schemes. Providers still get paid for individual services but the rate depends on quality metrics of their overall population. (Source: worked in software for Population Health)
The inefficiencies you describe are less from the clinical side and more from the administrative side. Many of these admin-level people are doing what they can in an incredibly complex maze of processes, most of which started for a good reason. But they are process bees, and unable to make any changes: there's a huge barrier to change as of course nobody wants to be responsible for worse outcomes / deaths due to failure to respect process—yet they are immune from repercussions if poor outcomes are cause by said process.
More to the point, clinicians live in a constant grey zone: everything is a risk tradeoff and they do what they can to get the best outcome. The adminstrative folk see things in black and white. Here's a real example: outpatient office has slightly expired meds that are life-saving if a procedure goes bad, but new meds are not available because factory got damaged by hurricane. Common-sense is that a med does go from perfect to useless overnight and a few weeks is no big deal, especially when there is no alternative. Administrative view is the meds can't be used and must immediately be discarded because having them around the office will expose them to liability during audits... yet of course doesn't understand why that means all procedures of that type would get cancelled.
The reality is probably more like: You're exposed to millions of different viral antigens over the course of your lifetime; Many of them don't have a mechanism to really hurt you, and nearly all of them are dealt with efficiently by your immune system.
Not only do they not cause symptoms, we don't even have a mechanism to identify them unless we already know what we're looking for.
When my grandfather had his gall bladder removed (late 1960s, I think), he spent about 4-6 weeks in hospital and another couple of weeks at home recovering; last year, I had my gall bladder removed, they sent me home after three days. Now that's progress!
Still 4-6 weeks of recovery, but that's mostly due to them having to inflate the abdominal cavity to be able to see / work and a bit of bruising and shifting of stuff.
Next time you can try Ibuprofen + Tylenol, to avoid mentioned side effects.
Ibuprofen Plus Acetaminophen Equals Opioid Plus Acetaminophen for Acute Severe Extremity Pain: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2018/0301/p348.html
As far as I can tell, gall bladder removal is a fairly routine procedure by now, and the risks and possible complications are well enough understood that a competent surgeon can tell after three days if the procedure went well or if there are any problems. (Also, they told me to come back immediately if I experienced any pain or fever, or the incisions appeared not to heal properly.)
I Germany, hospitals usually get flat fee per case depending on the diagnosis, so there is an incentive to release patients as soon as possible. But all the doctors and nurses I have met so far take the health of their patients very seriously, and I do not believe they would release somebody who was still in need of medical care. Plus, ethical considerations aside, that might incur legal repercussions for the hospital and the doctor ordering the release, even in Germany.
Being able to get up and move around on the next day vs. having to lie in bed for weeks certainly makes a difference psychologically, but the laparoscopic procedure does put a much smaller burden on the body, too.
There's a lesson in that...sometimes being right isn't enough on it's own.
"Mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished"
Maybe in a few years we'll lament that...