I never fail to find myself astonished that people in a highly technical field, which is extremely refractory to the layman, nonetheless commonly feel themselves perfectly competent to operate in another highly technical field, entirely orthogonal to their own. The Renaissance man, made obsolete by complexity, is one with history; specialization is the order of the day.
There is no controversy in the statement that not everyone is, or can be, equipped to serve as his own programmer or systems administrator; indeed, the very existence of the field in which most of us find our vocation suffices to demonstrate that fact. Yet many of these very same people consider the mere suggestion, that the same should be true of the field of medicine, as nigh unto an insult direct -- as though it carried some imputation of essential incompetence, rather than being a statement of trivially evident fact. I despair of ever understanding why this should be, live however long I might.
It's also not possible for a physician to be informed about every possible condition. I have type 1 diabetes, and I know a lot more about it than my GP does -- odds are she's only going to see a handful of T1Ds in her career. When I'm talking to her about my diabetes, I'm educating her rather than vice versa. (So she sends me to an endocrinologist, and he's as far ahead of me as my GP is behind me in knowledge of diabetes.)
You are absolutely right. The one thing we definitely know is that we're still a long ways off from even having the books written on it all, let alone any one human having even majority of the information in their brain. I'm in pathology, sort of the end of the diagnostic road. We have the molecular tests and microscopes. And we still don't know. In fact, we're best positioned to see the vast ocean of unknown before us. We can't even see the other side.
Sorry to hear about the diagnosis, you've done extraordinary things despite it and I hope more patients can emulate your success. I am constantly educated by my patients.
You're not Canadian, are you? The GP vs endocrinologist issue is actually well-studied there. Unsurprisingly, the specialist-treated patients fair better.
Are you sure, because I used webMD to diagnose my spontaneous pneumothorax. Went to the clinic told them as much, they laughed. Finally ended up doing a chest x-ray after which a very stern faced doc walked up to me and said, "Sorry, we've never seen this here before. You need to go to the hospital right now."
That was the longer part of the story about the ct scan which was done post-recovery to look for blebs.
3 doctors completely missed huge warning signs and prescribed strong antibiotics in spite of the fact that there was no evidence of infection.
It was only thanks to my being an informed healthcare consumer that I prevented a very bad weekend.
I think it's possible for non-physicians to make informed decisions. I would also say that many want to have someone to blame. In my case, though, blaming someone doesn't help much when your kidneys die.
I'd argue that a $100 DNA test is not a diagnosis tool. It's like a friend looking at your skin and saying 'hey, you should get that mole checked out'.
[1] In the form of Pantothen, the "Natural Acne Cure". Yeah.
I'd argue the same. But that's not in the slightest how 23andme presents itself.
This is a bit offtopic, but how about "because it was terrible before the collapse of their government, and still is terrible?"
And yet libertarians don't move there. It's baffling. Every single U.S. libertarian talks a great game, but not one of them is willing to put their money where their mouth is.
And yet leftists don't move there. It's baffling. Every single U.S. big government liberal talks a great game, but not one of them is willing to put their money where their mouth is.
The difference is that you can actually find people with some frequency who espouse the virtues of extremely small or entirely absent government, while it's pretty hard to find someone who espouses the virtues of a totalitarian, all-controlling state.
I don't see how that follows. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You got out of North Korea by hand-waving that nobody explicitly wants a "totalitarian, all-controlling state" - yet the libertarian argument is that the constant push to have the government control more and more parts of society constitutes clear, if inadvertent, steps towards exactly that.
Also, the point raised isn't about whether Somalia/North Korea is a libertarian/statist paradise, it's why libertarians/statist don't move there. The answer is in almost all cases, "because I don't want to".
That said, Somalia being unpleasant has a lot more to do with it being extremely poor and ravaged by civil war than is has to do with a lack of government. But in the stateless period, a good number of things improved significantly, despite the lack of government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Somalia_(1991%E2%80%...
Or maybe you are retired, etc.
In many areas Somalia did significantly improve compared to it's past government and is better off than the countries around it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TTOsWym-dI
Additionally only a small percent of libertarians are anti-statists and want the government gone completely.
I'm not sure if you're serious. If you're not, I apologize.
If you are, please show me someone claiming that "no government absolutely implies an excellent, beautiful place." Most of the libertarians I know recognize that a place without a government can still be a hellhole. Like Somalia.
Hi, physician here. No, that's not why you need the FDA. You need the FDA to protect you for all sorts of reasons. It is not possible for a non-physician to be an informed healthcare consumer. Everything from not marketing methamphetamine to high school students, to ensuring your brain doesn't get cooked by a bug in a CT scanner's software.
There are a lot of ways to die. But on a scale of 1 to 10, death is an 8. Wait till it's your kid.
I had a conversation with a libertarian friend of mine recently:
Me: "If you like libertarianism so much, why not just move to Somalia?"
Him: "Hey, just make sure you're the one with an AK"
Me: "Who's standing watch when you sleep? Where are they looking?"