That's not at all how actual science works. Actual science admits "This is our best understanding currently. Feel free to improve upon it."
Shouldn't we be well past the abusive treatment doled out to Galileo for daring to dissent? He was eventually determined to be correct, but it was well after his death, so it did nothing to remedy his troubles.
Otherwise any joe shmoe with a youtube following can start encouraging nursing mothers to have a glass of pigs blood before bed or some other nonsense.
It's tempting to imagine expertise as something that should be equitable, but it's hard to beat the foundational knowledge of someone who had four years of biology coursework, four years of medical course work, for years of residency, then however many years still in the field, still thinking about the same problems and how to solve them, vs. someone who spent 2 hours searching google or struggling through pubmed articles and are looking to best the person providing them care.
Galileo was a university trained physicist and astronomer with over 30 years in the field, he wasn't a layman at all. In fact, a little more on Galileo.
He wasn't condemned for 'daring do dissent,' his theories had merit and supporters. Galileo just critiqued people's theories so throughly and aggressively in his letters that he pissed a lot of people off in academic italy by just dismantling their work. Eventually one prick got the inquisition on the case, the pope asked galileo to write a detailed book to set the record straight with his theories, and while galileo did that he did it by making the pope a character in his book, portrayed as complete idiot, circulated the book all over catholic Europe, and shit naturally hit the fan. Apples and oranges.
The reason you see the same treatments and basic medicines and panels each time you go to the GP is because your problems are pedestrian compared to what doctors actually train for. Most likely, you're not even being seen by someone with an M.D. - casual checkups are often beneath their paygrade.
Doctors undergo a decade of specialized training in order to diagnose and treat issues far beyond anything that you can Just Google. Determining the factors affecting which treatments to apply, considering the tradeoffs, and making the right call are skills that AI will not achieve in our lifetime, no matter how many VC-funded tech-bro AI startups try.
If you could spend a day in the shoes of an aspiring medical resident, working 80-hour weeks and studying for board exams at the same time, you'd count your lucky stars that we don't license the software profession like we do medicine. Maybe we should.
Surely, differentiating between a garden-variety peptic ulcer and stomach cancer can be difficult given the symptom overlap but that's why doctors undergo a decade of specialized training, right? Alas, all the doctor he scheduled a casual checkup with could see was that this patient's pedestrian problems were beneath their paygrade. At least as far as I was told, his symptoms were dismissed out of hand and he was diagnosed with an ulcer and sent on his way without any sort of workup being done. Presumably the doctor felt that spending time diagnosing someone with such common symptoms was not what they trained for.
I guess VC-funded tech-bro AI startups don't have a monopoly on making the wrong call. (Or on hubris!)
Take the case of someone having a psychotic episode for the first time, with no prior history, who goes into the ER. The doctors will instantly put them on an anti psychotic medication. This decision will usually stop the psychosis, and means that they "fixed" the patient. But the ramifications of being put on these drugs prior to a proper diagnoses could be that the patient is never able to successfully get off them, a lifetime of drug dependence due to a split second decision. (Getting off these drugs often causes psychosis in itself, which creates a vicious life long cycle).
The medical institution bears no error in this case, they gave "treatment". Not putting the patient on medication is a risk to them, so they do it every time. The patient is uneducated in this matter, does not know that they will damage their brain, lose IQ points. The list goes on and on, it happens every day.
Treating the sniffles does not require a personalized care plan in the majority of cases. You'll get the bog standard treatment of the symptoms, which is actually the best we can do. It would be an institutional waste to personalize that kind of care for each patient and provision an M.D. each time -- you'd actually be putting other patients at risk, with more complicated problems, who critically need that doctor's experience instead.
A family member went to the doctor to get a work up on a rare disease. The work up basically followed a flow chart from a specialist center that was easily accessible online.
I’m sure there’s some additional confidence from experience and knowledge of the first principles that vastly outweighs my judgement, but on the surface it didn’t seem like the doctor had obtained a skill set that should command a 2x-3x training and schooling premium.
IT doesn't reprovision your work laptop after you accidentally deleted a file, they follow the appropriate process for the task ("they just pulled up the system restore flow chart, what am I even paying these guys for").
The industry as it currently is, with restricted supply of doctors, memory based entrance exams, etc makes no sense
Isn’t that akin to “Treating the symptoms”? Eg. In case of most common viral infections, you literally can’t do anything but treat the symptoms.
> They prescribe the same thing to the same set of symptoms basically every time, without much capacity to take in the nuances of some condition.
Could it be because statistically “trivial cases that they, in their practice, have treated numerous times” occur more frequently than rare cases? (I’m speculating).
I really dislike the idea of a club with legal powers over you, such as doctors or lawyers, that both set their own rules and control entrance to the club.
It strikes me as feudalistic and undemocratic. Oppressive. As an American I find it vaguely un-American!
In the broadest sense, there are two types of things in the world: things that tend toward (or cluster around) some kind of “natural” value, and things that don’t.
Often times, you are not briefed on the distribution of the graph which the very "average" is being derived from, viscerally it is being surmised that it follows a “Gaussian” distribution by the patient which then makes significant medical decisions based on such bits of information.
Therefore, I'd advise caution for those who'd base their medical decisions on arbitrary "averages", instead you are much better off if you were to take a look at the graph to see if the word "average" carries any meaning at all in such distributions.
(As best I can remember, those were his exact words. No, I'm not cleaning it up to be more PC.)
“Average” is a very vague term.
It stuck with me because it's a nutshell version of the book "How to lie with statistics" in a humorous and highly memorable form. Someone with one breast, one testicle and a little penis would be a bizarre statistical outlier for the human race, but "mathematically" speaking, it's an accurate description.
It speaks to a lot of common errors of logic and it's pithy.
Not sure, but I wonder if more nuance in statements like this would make them more persuasive. For some reason absolute certainty kind of turns me off.
You arent some kind of high priest, I am allowed to question and understand medicine. I am also not afraid of academic publications, and attempts at belittling me for doing so come from a place of insecurity on your part.
All of that knowledge in your head is on the internet.