Comment by throwawaynotmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaynotmd | Hacker News Reader

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>Many times the patient will push them for further tests and treatment (or the doctors will advocate for it to ease the mind of the patient) which leads to potential harm from unnecessary treatments.

>People will ask to be treated anyway, and iatrogenics will rear its ugly head.

I just want to say that you are in agreement with my position here.

Your point about psychological problems is interesting, but as long as people know what they’re signing up for, it’s okay. Some people aren’t prone to anxiety. Why should they pay the price because other people are? Part of my original point was that implicit in your argument is that people capable of handling it should be denied something because more people incapable of handling it can’t be stopped from hurting themselves. I think many people do not agree with that moral reasoning, so medical people hide it behind objective looking statistics.

And as for cost, I don’t take any arguments from medical people about cost seriously. The reason why costs are so high is because doctors and the medical field as a whole run a massive protectionist racket to keep the supply of medical professionals low.

How fresh of them to say that because they’ve limited the supply of medical resources to enrich themselves, patients must pay by having less access to care.

I think once you become a doctor, you quickly realize that a large amount of the population do not have the temperament to deal with 'maybe' bad news. Many are not the 135 IQ %1 of the population with a low anxiety personality who accept that they will eventually grow old and die, which happens to coincide with many engineering types on HN.

Lol, i would argue that engineers, many of whose primary job function is to imagine worst case scenarios and engineer around those to prevent accidents, data loss, etc. Are the exact type of people that are prone to hypochondria. It's not about growing old and dying, it's about ignoring a stomach ache for a couple months and then being told you have terminal cancer, and then living with the regret of "if only I got it checked out earlier".

In the engineering world, you are almost always rewarded for being extra safe and testing, fixing, and investigating anything that might seem a little off. If you do blood tests, MRIs, and cancer screens for every mole, cough, and stomach pain, you will go insane and develop hypochondria.

I guess depends on the mental counter response those engineers take. Because you have to think about every possibility, you create a counter temperment that doesn't implode thinking about every possibility.

Some might go the other way, and their anxious personality might help them think about everything, but also make them a stress case.

I think the first type tends to last longer in the industry, at least for my coworkers.

Your point about a protectionist racket doesn't hold for countries in the EU which have the same rules around research data and patients

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