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Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

It's scary how hard it is to get quality diagnosis and how stubborn the medical establishment is in maintaining the current status quo. We have treatments for many diseases. We know the symptoms. But because your physician might not know about something, you might need to pinball between specialists (losing time and money) or even not properly get diagnosed at all.

A free web-based expert system for medical diagnostics could save a lot of lives. It's really something that should be tackled by the government (because of liability issue).

Instead, we have shitty scaremongering websites that list similar symptoms for most diseases, don't give any probabilities, don't tell you what tests are available and instead tell you to "contact your physician".

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Of course we have treatments and symptoms for many diseases. But many diseases present the same way. In fact many symptoms are a result of immune response, so naturally they are going to be difficult to differentiate. It's not because the physician doesn't know something. Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person.

Overtreatment and overdiagnosis is also a thing. How would you like receiving thousands of dollars of testing every time you visited the doc?

There will be bad docs like in any field but its presumptuous to think most don't know what they're doing.

>Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person.

I'm talking about an expert system. You enter symptoms. It asks you questions. Then it says something "there a high probability you have X and medium probability you have Y".

And a physical exam? Who's going to listen to your lungs and heart, check out your throat, ears, nose, eyes? Those are invaluable in diagnosing even the most common illnesses.

I will mention years ago Kaiser Permanente gave their members this very good book called the Healthwise Handbook. It described many many common conditions, what you could do, and under what conditions to contact your doctor.

They stopped giving it out.

It would be nice to have an expert system to guide you through things. I wouldn't mind if it "paused the dignosis" like:

"It could be A, B or C. Look for <symptom> or try <action> to narrow it down"

Now that I think of it, I have used basically one expert systems in my life. It was the windows diagnosis thing.. "did that fix your problem?" the only thing it fixed was a network problem, once.

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