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Comment by nmcfarl | Hacker News Reader

You are right - she doesn’t. My wife, a 4th year med student blanket opinion of self-diagnostic websites for the general public is they are trying to kill their customers. And more and more I agree.

If you are ill and you don’t know what’s going on, see a doc (or a nurse practitioner etc). Uninsured (yeah - that’s me till 2 months ago.) - then it will cost a packet. Which is good as you’ll be encouraged to figure out what’s normal for your body - which is what needs to happen anyhow.

Remote diagnostics is a hard game even if a doc is doing it. A rules engine just isn’t up to it. It’s not just a game of checklists. This thing might be better (It’s down right now) - but nothing is as good as being in a room with the patient, having some EQ, asking questions, and being able to view symptoms with your own 2 eyes.

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I don't know. The advantage of such expert systems is that they have access to the entire database, never forget anything and can recalculate all relevant probabilities on the fly. Your doctor can't do that.

Although the linked site failed completely (as far as I can tell, because its buggy!), the WebMD that was linked elsewhere correctly diagnosed my condition in less than 2 minutes. It took a real MD 2 hours+ and that included an (unnecessary) X-ray.

I don't think it's comparable to remote diagnosis being hard - that is very dependent on how doctors recall information, and visual information or feedback may be very important to them. An expert system has no such limitations.

Sorry that it's down. Getting a lot of HN traffic.

I tend to agree with your wife (I'm a 4th year med student at Hopkins), which is why I'm building my own.

I think it's easy for websites to just say "if you are concerned, see a doctor" but I also believe that to be the problem. Obviously, if it were costless (time, money, opportunity cost) people would go see a doctor, but they in reality are weighing those costs. We'd like to make it easy for people to weight the risk vs. the benefits of seeing a doctor.

Moreover, for too many people "seeing a doctor" means going straight to the ER. There they wait for 4 hours (nat'l average) and are frequently told to follow-up with a doc anyway. We want to let others know that there are other options (eg urgent care centers) and let them know when such care is clinically indicated.

As a doctor I think it is a great idea and I think there are many sources of automation that haven't been implemented in health care yet.

Learning medicine is all about learning diagnostic algorithms

You're assuming everyone has easy access to effective healthcare.

I really don’t think I am - at least not by (lower-48) US standards.

I’m probably just thinking that /very/ large sacrifices may be needed, even just for diagnostics.

-- Heavily edited

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