Is this statement supported by facts? If anything this statement is just your internal sentiment. If you claim it’s not supported by facts the proper thing you should do is offer facts to counter his statement. Don’t claim his statement isn’t supported by facts than make a counter claim without facts yourself.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/07/21/misdiagnoses-cost-the-u-...
Read that fact. 800,000 deaths from misdiagnosis a year is pretty pathetic. And this is just deaths. I can guarantee you the amount of mistakes unreported that don’t result in deaths dwarfs that number.
Engineers who were responsible for the crashing Boeing 737 mcas units have a BETTER outcomes than this. In the year that those planes crashed you have a 135x better survival rate of getting on a 737 max then you are getting an important diagnosis from a doctor and not dying from a misdiagnosis. Yet doctors are universally respected and Boeing as a corporation was universally reviled that year.
I will say this GPs are in general not very competent. They are about as competent and trust worthy as a car mechanic. There are good ones, bad ones, and also ones that bullshit and lie. Don’t expect anything more than that, and this is supported by facts.
Yeah, the main fact here is called medical school.[0]
>Read that fact. 800,000 deaths from misdiagnosis a year is pretty pathetic. And this is just deaths.
Okay, and if that somehow flows from GPs (but not specialists!) being uniquely poor at problem solving relative to all other types of physicians—irrespective of wider issues inherent in the U.S. healthcare system—then I stand corrected.
>135x better survival rate of getting on a 737 max
The human body isn't a 737.
>I will say this GPs are in general not very competent. They are about as competent and trust worthy as a car mechanic.
Ignorant.
[0] https://medstudenthandbook.hms.harvard.edu/md-program-object...
Instead you say “medical school” and cite the Harvard handbook as if everyone went to Harvard and that the medical book was a quantitative metric on problem solving success or failure. Come on man. Numbers. Not manuals.
> The human body isn't a 737
Are you joking? You know a 737 is responsible for ensuring the survival of human bodies hurdling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour at altitudes higher than Mount Everest? The fact that your risk of dying is lower going through that then getting a correct diagnosis from a doctor is quite pathetic.
This statement you made here is manipulative. You know what I mean by that comparison. Don’t try to spin it like I'm not talking about human lives.
> Ignorant.
Being a car mechanic is a respectable profession. They get the typical respect of any other occupation and nothing beyond that. I’m saying doctors deserve EXACTLY the same thing. The problem is doctors sometimes get more than that and that is not deserved at all. Respect is earned and the profession itself doesn’t earn enough of that respect.
Are you yourself a doctor? If so your response speaks volumes about the treatment your patients will get.
No. The human body actually isn't a 737.
>This statement you made here is manipulative. You know what I mean by that comparison. Don’t try to spin it like I'm not talking about human lives.
Let me spell it out then: The mechanisms by which a human body and a 737 work are so vastly different that one may as well be alien to the other. It's quite an apples and oranges comparison.
Yeah, you can draw parallels in some areas but I'd say on the whole the analogy isn't exactly apt. That said, I'll indulge:
Imagine if every 737 was a few orders of magnitude more complex, and also so different to the point that no plane even looked or functioned the same. Then, imagine we didn't fully understand how they worked.
Point being: Medicine is fuzzy because the human body is fuzzy and imprecise. Everybody's a little different. Contrast to aviation, which is very much an exact science and engineering discipline at this point.
Medicine isn't engineering. Treating patients isn't the same as the design and manufacture of aircraft.
That of course doesn't excuse shitty healthcare systems that can clearly do better when stats indicate there's preventable adverse outcomes happening. I just don't think laying the blame at the feet of doctors somehow being too stupid to problem solve is helpful when there's a larger system that's preventing them from doing their best work for their patients. If anything that narrative is counterproductive.
>Are you yourself a doctor?
Nope, just a layperson who knows they're a layperson.
No shit sherlock.
>Let me spell it out then: The mechanisms by which a human body and a 737 work are so vastly different that one may as well be alien to the other. It's quite an apples and oranges comparison.
Should've done this in the first place because no one understands what you're saying otherwise.
The problem internals are different but we are comparing the outcome and that is: human lives. You seem to think this is an invalid comparison. It's not.
>Medicine isn't engineering. Treating patients isn't the same as the design and manufacture of aircraft.
I never said that. The whole point was you made the claim doctors are good problem solvers because they went to medical school.
I said that claim is utter bullshit. They aren't that good and they misdiagnose shit all the time. The point still stands and you delivered evidence to validate that. You said Medicine is fuzzy and engineering exact. You said the problem was vastly more complex as well.
All of this proves the point. The problem is harder, the science is fuzzy. Doctors armed with medical science, which is definitively worse, operating on a problem that is definitively harder will be generally WORSE problem solvers then people in other occupations IF we hold everything else the same. So doctors as a group ARE not good problem solvers. That WAS the point. We are referring to doctors as a group and thus the ONLY point of comparison for problem solvers ARE other occupations.
That's just a given and it follows from your OWN logic.
>That of course doesn't excuse shitty healthcare systems that can clearly do better when stats indicate there's preventable adverse outcomes happening. I just don't think laying the blame at the feet of doctors somehow being too stupid to problem solve is helpful when there's a larger system that's preventing them from doing their best work for their patients. If anything that narrative is counterproductive.
Did I lay the blame on doctors? No. I just said they aren't good problem solvers. That's a fact. That's not blame.
But let's be clear, I agree it's counter productive to lay blame OR call doctors stupid and such a thing WAS not done by me. I was simply making the claim that THEY are NOT good problem solvers. You inserted extra negative sentiment into the "narrative" as an hallucination by your own imagination.
Look, point is you're wrong on every count. Doctors are not good at problem solving period. They're pretty bad at it. The comparison with aviation engineers is apt because those guys are GOOD problem solvers.
And again, it's not the doctors fault that they are incompetent. It's the hardness of the problem and the limitations of the science that make them like this.
I don't know how you expect people to take you seriously, but good luck.
In one case, a specialist made arguments that were trivially logically fallacious and went directly against the evidence from treatment outcomes.
In other cases, sheer stupidity of pattern matching with rational thinking seemingly totally turned off. E.g. hearing I'd had a sinus infection for a long time, and insisting that this meant it was chronic and chronic meant the solution was steroids rather than antibiotic, despite a previous course having done nothing, and despite the fact that an antibiotic course had removed most of the symptoms both indicating the opposite - in the end, after bypassing my GP at the time and explaining and begging an advance nurse practitioner, I got two more courses of antibiotic and the infection finally fully went.
I'm sure all of them could have done better, and that a lot of it is down to dysfunction, such as too little time allotted to actually look at things properly, but some of the interactions (the logical fallacy in particular) have also clearly been down to sheer ignorance.
I also expect they'd eventually get there, but doing your own reading and guiding things in the right direction can often short-circuit a lot of bullshit that might even deliver good outcomes in a cost effective way on a population level, but might cause you lots of misery in the meantime...
However your anecdotal experience is not only inline with my own experience. It is actually inline with the facts as well.
When the person your responding to said that what you wasn’t backed up by facts I’m going to tell you straight up that, that statement was utter bullshit. Everything you’re saying here is true and generally true and something many many patients experience.
The person you just replied to here isn't the same person I replied to.
I imagine the issue with problem solving more lays in the system doctors are stuck in and the complete lack of time they have to spend on patients.
As opposed to what, proving that GPs are highly trained, not inherently inferior to other types of physicians, and regularly conduct complex problem solving?
Heck, while I'm at it I may as well attempt to prove the sky is blue.
>I imagine the issue with problem solving more lays in the system doctors are stuck in and the complete lack of time they have to spend on patients.
Bingo.
Pay for concierge medicine and a private physician and you get great health care. That's not what ordinary health insurance pays for.
In reality you'll find the vast majority of GPs are highly intelligent and quite good at problem solving.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say their training is so intensive and expansive that laypeople who make such comments are profoundly lacking in awareness on the topic.
Physicians are still human, so like anything there's of course bad ones, specialists included. There's also healthcare systems with various degrees of dysfunction and incentives that don't necessarily align with the patient.
None of that means GPs are somehow less competent at solving problems; not only is it an insult but it's ridiculous on the face of it.