Comment by HunterWare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HunterWare | Hacker News Reader

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Wiki says there are 950k docs in the US. I'll start with thinking that since I don't have better numbers, that is a good initial estimate. I'll next estimate that there are less that 1k doctors wildly prescribing Oxy to patients and wind back up at my 1:999 ratio. I bet, frankly the odds are actually way BETTER than that. And I'll just finish by pointing out I didn't say "1 bad apple", I said "1 in 999 doctor apples are bad for the sake of this argument.

On the expert in all fields: actually I just disagree here. I get your point but I think my summary is right. Let's again take the doctor sub-argument. If I decide that because my nephew's college roommate's friend had a doctor who was a bad apple (bad call? Oxy abuser? whatever) that I won't trust doctors anymore then the result will be that I become the medical expert in my life. As I am no longer delegating that competency and expertise to doctors, I have now assumed that role. Then add to that my assuming all the other roles that the top post used as examples and I'm now (in my world) the export (for me) on all those subjects.

I don't know about you, but I have a life and just don't have the time to be an expert on geopolitics, all fields the press is covering, all house repairs, my car, science, my health, and everything else mentioned... (1) For my part? Thank god for qualified experts.

1 - from top post: "Politicians, journalists, contractors, car mechanics, scientists, all experts and all professionals with with trust issues."

Out of all things, one should take time to trust and verify about one's health and body. And at least some knowledge about car mechanics and home repair/contracting. The latter two are just a reality of life if you don't want to get scammed and/or have a really bad job done by contractors.

It's not really fair, but also we don't -make- time to understand our bodies. It's a total choice. Preventative care is so important, yet hardly anyone takes the time to do it, only going in once issues develop.

It's not about totally rejecting anything an expert says. It's more about trust, but verify, and take the lead yourself to be on top of things.

In my personal experience, I am the one who has had to try to figure out my diagnosis so far because my GP, Dermatologist, and Immunologist haven't been very helpful. Most of my sessions over the last year were about 10-15 minutes, I answer some questions, and here are some pills, come back in a month. There hasn't been much testing after the initial battery of tests in the first ~2 months. I'm the one who has had to take the lead and be aggressive about trying to figure out a diagnosis, and now, about getting a referral to a tertiary/quaternary center with better immunologist experts to hopefully figure out the cause of this damn thing.

It's not that I don't trust doctors- it's the opposite! But this whole situation has made me wary about blindly trusting anything or sticking to their timelines. My Immunologist emphatically stated that "it can't be gluten"- well guess what? So far, not eating gluten is appearing to help. It's only been ~1.5 weeks so we'll need to see. Of course I recognize that diagnosing skin issues/dermatitis is totally different than other types of issues.

I suspect that we aren't so far apart on this as one might think. The more central an issue is to your life, the better the rewards for developing some local expertise are. One can imagine that this is why some people develop into the domain experts they are, that field was central to their life.

I think, however, this is a different discussion. The article was about the value of domain experts and trust in them, and I feel it's sad this is somehow contentious (although thankfully less so on this forum). I believe another article could be written about the need to improve access to relevant domain experts (your premise I believe) and the need to increase accountability of experts/professionals (another person's premise). Both are worthy areas to examine once we acknowledge the importance of domain experts and offloading/delegating to them...

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