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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

This is crock.

The reason you see the same treatments and basic medicines and panels each time you go to the GP is because your problems are pedestrian compared to what doctors actually train for. Most likely, you're not even being seen by someone with an M.D. - casual checkups are often beneath their paygrade.

Doctors undergo a decade of specialized training in order to diagnose and treat issues far beyond anything that you can Just Google. Determining the factors affecting which treatments to apply, considering the tradeoffs, and making the right call are skills that AI will not achieve in our lifetime, no matter how many VC-funded tech-bro AI startups try.

If you could spend a day in the shoes of an aspiring medical resident, working 80-hour weeks and studying for board exams at the same time, you'd count your lucky stars that we don't license the software profession like we do medicine. Maybe we should.

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The father of a childhood friend of mine was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer and died of stomach cancer about six months later. The stomach cancer that actually wasn't just a peptic ulcer was only diagnosed a few weeks before his death once he was hospitalized because he was dying.

Surely, differentiating between a garden-variety peptic ulcer and stomach cancer can be difficult given the symptom overlap but that's why doctors undergo a decade of specialized training, right? Alas, all the doctor he scheduled a casual checkup with could see was that this patient's pedestrian problems were beneath their paygrade. At least as far as I was told, his symptoms were dismissed out of hand and he was diagnosed with an ulcer and sent on his way without any sort of workup being done. Presumably the doctor felt that spending time diagnosing someone with such common symptoms was not what they trained for.

I guess VC-funded tech-bro AI startups don't have a monopoly on making the wrong call. (Or on hubris!)

Mostly the reason you see the same treatments is because there is no useful treatment, but they provide one anyways. Or they run a battery of tests, partly because they need to, to cover their ass from malpractice law suits, but also because its profitable for the hospital to do so.

Take the case of someone having a psychotic episode for the first time, with no prior history, who goes into the ER. The doctors will instantly put them on an anti psychotic medication. This decision will usually stop the psychosis, and means that they "fixed" the patient. But the ramifications of being put on these drugs prior to a proper diagnoses could be that the patient is never able to successfully get off them, a lifetime of drug dependence due to a split second decision. (Getting off these drugs often causes psychosis in itself, which creates a vicious life long cycle).

The medical institution bears no error in this case, they gave "treatment". Not putting the patient on medication is a risk to them, so they do it every time. The patient is uneducated in this matter, does not know that they will damage their brain, lose IQ points. The list goes on and on, it happens every day.

I hope you're not a medical professional. If an individual has a problem (mental or physical), it is never pedestrian, beneath a paygrade, or reason to avoid a personalized treatment plan. If you feel this way, go into research and do not interact with another patient ever again. Sickening attitude.

Let me be clear: there are conditions that are routine, and whose treatment is deferred to roles that are not as specialized as a doctor. That does not mean that the provider/patient interaction is any less personable just because the treatment is standardized.

Treating the sniffles does not require a personalized care plan in the majority of cases. You'll get the bog standard treatment of the symptoms, which is actually the best we can do. It would be an institutional waste to personalize that kind of care for each patient and provision an M.D. each time -- you'd actually be putting other patients at risk, with more complicated problems, who critically need that doctor's experience instead.

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