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Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly it. Doctors have neither any incentive to actually treat nontrivial cases, nor any accountability over whether they do.

Combined with the prestige of the profession, many turn into egoistic know-it-alls whose real competence is equivalent to a car mechanic who tells you you're just driving your car wrong when you come in with anything that's not obvious from a 15s inspection because they get paid anyway.

I would be surprised if most of the doctors I've seen could outperform even GPT-2.

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For every one person misdiagnosed there are probably 10 that think they have cancer because of webMD. People are dumb, and I bet every anecdote you have about how your doctor was wrong they have 50 about patients who refused to do basic treatment courses that would radically improve their lives. But it's ultimately true: you have to be somewhat knowledgeable and responsible for your own health. Always get a second opinion if you're unsure. But this know it all syndrome also applies to you. Just because you can "do your own research" on google doesn't mean you know it all either.

Even so doctors are extremely overworked now and insurance companies don't want to pay their fees. So now they're running from patient to patient, unable to even pay attention to them. That's even if you get a doctor now before the multiple nurse practitioners or physician's assistants who also don't know anything.

I get that, but that doesn’t explain why they’re always so overeager to prescribe hardcore drugs or over-operate routine problems. The role of doctors in the entire opiates crisis is pretty damning.

I’ve had a couple of surgeries and the eagerness of doctors to give me opiates for pain relief was baffling, even when I clearly told them that I can tolerate the pain and don’t need anything stronger than ibuprofen.

It's a lot harder to overprescribe addictive drugs now. Much much harder. But your point remains. The problem wasn't so much painkillers after a major back surgery - it was prescribing to treat chronic pain - which, in hindsight, is an obvious way to get people addicted. What isn't told is how insurance would only cover pills, not more expensive therapies (to deal with the underlying issues.) Now you have a patient who's in some pretty serious pain and you have an FDA approved pill to treat it. In a country that still has TV ads for medicine, the outcome isn't that surprising. It's also why opioid addiction is a strictly american phenomenon.

Working as a surgery resident and now in IR, I can tell you it’s much better to be a little overprescritvie in addressing post-op pain than to get behind and underdose.

Also opiates in a short term setting are good meds. Pain control is good and people are able to get moving faster.

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