That's a little surprising to me. One of the coolest things about practicing medicine today is that I can pull out my phone in front of a patient and find guidelines that I'm not familiar with, medication side-effects, and other point-of-care resources that really do enhance my clinical ability in real-time.

Granted, I work in a hospital setting. Maybe it's different in the clinics.

BTW, though I feel I'm underpaid for what I do (which many outsiders would find ridiculous), I'm overall pretty happy with being a physician.

> I'd take a crowd sourced db of health info over a doctor's personal knowledge any day of the week.

So would I. But what you'd learn in the first week of hanging out with a doctor in a typical clinical setting is that most patients are frankly too uneducated to be able to use that kind of tool. When I did residency, I suspect most of the patients I saw didn't have internet. Many were illiterate and a disturbing number simply didn't care about their own well-being.

I'd love to build up a practice with patients like you, but people like you tend to be pretty healthy.

> I'd love to build up a practice with patients like you, but people like you tend to be pretty healthy.

There's also the factor that teaching hospitals tend to get a lot of poor and uneducated patients. Private clinics have a different clientèle, and there are definitely plenty of individuals out there who are not in perfect medical condition, yet are educated/informed enough for doctors to interact with on a higher level than they currently do.

Watson thread from <1 week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8237618

Yep. There's apps to do your taxes. But the average person isn't able to understand double entry accounting without doing a year of study on it.

Yup, they do it behind the scenes. They worry that too many patients would complain and feel insecure about a doctor having to do research in front of them, since the majority of patients want to feel that their doctor is the expert on all matters of their health. If a patient feels the care he/she wasn't up to par, and there are any complications, there is generally a very high risk of a lawsuit. So to prevent that, most doctors will do research outside of the view of the patient.

To be fair, they aren't sitting at their desks pulling up Wikipedia. Their research often consists of consulting with a specialist (or multiple specialists), consulting with colleagues, and searching through the volumes of medical periodicals and databases.

Most do this not just to be thorough and careful, but also because they know they need to practice defensive medicine and, well, cover their butts in case anything goes wrong.

I have. It's terrifying. I recently went to the GP, told them my condition (which had been diagnosed by a different GP) and their first response was to look it up on Wikipedia. Seriously. I understand that a GP isn't going to know every condition you come in with but Wikipedia as the reference material?

To top this all off, a GP is a General Practitioner. Their main role is to filter out the sniffles and the rashes, and keep an eye out for the more serious stuff, which gets passed on to an appropriate specialist. In the GP's case, going to Wikipedia gives a good, quick baseline on what the disease is. A GP shouldn't be prescribing drugs from WP, but if you say you've got McGrady's Syndrome, the GP looks it up quickly on WP (which is a very quick, concise resource), and finds out it's a liver problem of a certain type, the GP now has a base to work with. Liver problems mean X, Y, or Z in general, start looking at those avenues of inquiry.

The other thing is that while it should not be a canonical reference, when it comes to scientific topics, WP is very well written, concise, and quick to access. If you've ever used medical software, you'd know the high variety of quality there is - some is just plain awful when it comes to looking things up. And textbooks by their very nature go out of date.

Being realistic: yes, it's terrifying. GPs are subject to the same biases and prejudices as everyone else.

I think it's a great idea, and so I went looking for a StackExchange forum for it. It turns out there is one that is in the staging phase:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/66048/health

Obviously caveat emptor, YMMV etc. would apply to such a forum, and the other issue is that a patient posting there doesn't have access to all the diagnosis tools that doctors do.

Point is medical care is only as good as the quality of the "team" consisting of the doctor and the patient. It's a partnership, an expression of the doctor-patient relationship. Not every two people will form a natural team, after all, many marriages fail.

It's kind of a cliche, but still true, find a doctor you can work with, someone you can trust and relate to. More likely than not, that's the the definition of a "good" doctor.