I was married to a doctor, helped them study for board exams, etc and was surrounded by other doctors within our social circle. What most people don’t realize, and most doctors themselves refuse to acknowledge, is how limited by specialization their knowledge can be and how the education of most doctors stops after med school and residency. Nutrition, for example, is barely covered at all.
Yes, there are continuing education requirements and countless journals but most doctors do the bare minimum and don’t keep up. I’d even argue that most physician knowledge tends to be updated more often through drug and instrumentation reps promoting their products by taking them out to dinner and entering them into referral programs, etc.
I would expect specialists to be subscribed to journals and reading the latest articles in their field. When I saw a specialist at UCSF this was definitely the case; while my GP still has gaps where their current knowledge on a specific subject is from their time at med school.
An equivalence would be a front-end engineer being naive to the happenings on the Linux kernel mailing list. They could likely understand what's going on if they took the time to read it, but that is not their focus.
Yeah I can't with the "biology is orders of magnitude more complex than SE/CS or any other field for that matter" and then thinking he can explain to the techies how technology works. Just put the pills in the bag bro. Oh wait, we need to go to a pharmacist for that.
The med students I've known have been some of the most insufferable people I've met.
I'm a doctor as well and I think your statement here is too broad. Plenty of specialists such as cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, radiologists, etc are able to reason things from first principles. The issue is that many non-doctors may not know several key details about these systems that would let you reason through them. And even many doctors well versed in one specialty would be unable to reason about another specialty since they may not know in detail several key pieces of information from that other speciality.
I recall being an engineering classes, armed with just calculus and linear algebra and newton laws, I could attack just about every problem from first principles from my entire undergrad. Every. I didn't have to take into consideration real life presentation of the problem. First principles were enough to get me nearly there
Medicine is fundamentally not that way. Yes we learn the biology, but if you reason solely from biology, you will quickly end up in the wrong places. to become a doctor, I had to learn that hard way that yeah a disease doesn't just present this way just because the underlying physics and biology suggests it should. You separately have to learn how the disease presents, then try to tie it back to our extensive but still very very limited understanding of the possible biology.
I have problems with doctors that don't acknowledge how tenous that link is and despite how much we know, we still know so so little. We are far more useful than what we know.
I understand to biology majors, the few things that seem to follow physiologically from moelculqr biology dupes us into thinking medicine currebtly derives from first pricinples. But it doesnt.
0: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/galen/#M...
I'm not sure saying to not try to reason at all about mechanisms of actions is a good idea. If someone knows Tylenol is metabolized into chemicals that are toxic to liver, that is simple enough to understand and reason about
We’d all wish it’d be so, doctor. Sometimes it’s as clean as biological systems - touch something somewhere, a different seemingly completely unrelated thing elsewhere breaks.
Even in the dawn of the era, where accumulated complexity was a while lot lower, we have tales of 500-mile emails and “magic/more magic” switch ;-)
Inferring things in a legacy codebase old enough to drink can be quite a challenge. And the way I get it, you folks are dealing with a multimillenia-old mess of layering violations - so no surprise first principles are tricky.
The solace of made-up physics is there for every mediocre dude, from Uber founder Travis Kalanick down to any random guy who made $10M as the CTO of a third-rate video conferencing app and immediately broke up with his girlfriend.
One thing every single member of the general public needs to get drilled into them: Medical science is NOT intuitive. You cannot just read the mechanism of action of a drug and infer a dozen things from it. A drug's mechanism of action, its indication (when it ought to be used) and its adverse effects CANNOT simply be inferred logically from each other. Biology is orders of magnitude more complex than SE/CS or any other field for that matter.
I presume majority of readers here have SE/CS background. Dudes! the artifacts and systems in SE/CS have the following two properties:
1. They are human artifacts. We know exactly how they are build. The theory is all publicly accessible in principle.
2. They are layered logically on top of each other. Machine code, assembly, C, Java ... so on. Firmware, OS, drivers, apps .. etc. Clean layering.
The above two core properties make it possible to more or less reliably reason about bit SE/CS systems from first principles. The complete absence of above two in medicine means you cannot do the same there. Be very very careful when you import thinking habits for daily life , or other fields of expertise, into medicine.
"This video is just for informational purposes. Consult your health care provider for your particular situation" ...is not just a legal precaution. It is a sound life advice. Nothing in life is more crucial to leave it to the experts as health/medical inference and decision making.