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Comment by rudolf0 | Hacker News Reader

Doctors can be notoriously ignorant and contradictory when it comes to mental illness-treating drugs. There's a lot of literature out there and a lot of them don't keep up. I don't know why it is.

Not that you shouldn't trust doctors, but I always do some Googling to get a second opinion about all psychoactive drugs I'm prescribed.

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It's very very uneasy when doctors are too handwavey on your issues. You don't know if they're skipping beats because they don't want to explain 10 years of med school so you obey, or if they just don't want to investigate more than what the usual answer is.

I tried to nitpick on things that mattered for me, but you cannot easily claim "I'm more up to date than you on <xyz> illness" to a legal doctor without feeling a little ridiculous.

That's why I root for more non invasive monitoring and intervention. Many doctors told me the "based on these tests, you have nothing", bailing out when I asked for more because deeper tests would require potential ICU. So you end up floating in the unknown hoping for the best.

You may or may not be more up to date on a particular illness, but you are the best authority on your specific case.

But you have your own bias. The amount of fuzz from your personal data can be huge. That's why I wish I could have objective monitors and not rely on sparse visits to the doctor when symptoms aren't here.

One dared me to reproduce heart failure on the spot because there was some tension between me and him.

It odd.

Objective measures are always nice, but when there are none it all comes down to self report. Your own bias will still be present in that, and then you get to add on the doctors own bias. We hope that their experience can cut through both sources of distortion, but the less common the problem the harder that is.

You should always seek a second opinion from different specialists. If all of them tell you the very same thing it is probably safe to assume what they recommended is well established. But its far from being always the case. Doctors are not machines and influenced by a number of factors so none of them should be considered infaillible.

For GP's, it's because there's an increasing amount of information in every single field, so it stands to reason they'll be more on top of some than others. Where it gets bad is when they choose not to keep at least slightly up to date (well, literally UpToDate) on things like basic mental health that make up a huge portion of most GP practices.

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