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Comment by maz1b | Hacker News Reader

As a recent medical school graduate and a technical founder of a medical education startup, wow. This is an "edge case" for lack of a better phrase and is the kind of stuff that becomes widespread as lore or an interesting story - at least I'd like to think so.

Thanks for sharing your story and I wish you the best with what's next.

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IMHO the surest way to get pregnant is to be told by a doctor that you can't.

This is an interesting thought to entertain, but it sounds like sampling bias [0]. It's less remarkable if a doctor tells a patient that she can't get pregnant, and she doesn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

“ They Said I Would Never Walk Again And I Really Have To Commend Them For Their Spot-On Diagnosis”

The onion headline

Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.

All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

Yes. I found it interesting that fertility specialists are actually quite focused on statistics. It's because in majority of infertility cases there is either no explanation at all, or no absolute blockers to pregnancy, just less chances. The entire field is in big part focused on how to improve patient's chances in this dice roll.

Wouldn't you say that's a naive application of conditional probability?

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