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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

This is something that always kind of gets me, because when I have something wrong with me I will do a deep dive on it and read whatever studies, publications, and fellow patient accounts I can find.

This often puts me in a position where I feel pretty confident that I have more fresh knowledge about it than the doctor before me. Someone who in all likely hood has a mild familiarity with it, and is filling in the blanks with rote medical intuition.

What I really wish is that I could get doctors to drop the veil, and just openly admit what there depth of knowledge on the illness is. I would love it if they googled stuff right in front of me. I absolutely do not expect them to have a full medical encyclopedia in their head, and I am smart enough to be able to not be put off by "I don't know/I'm not sure".

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The flip side is imagine a project manager did this to a programmer or architect. The programmer would constantly need to explain why the blog post they read dated 2013 about how hadoop makes everything faster is wrong, or how that AI paper is bullshit and designed to get someone grant money. Or how someone else’s experience with Azure was great because they just shifted all their Windows stuff to it. So that could kind of stuff get frustrating for the expert.

It's interesting to imagine doctors understanding humans and their pathologies nearly as well as programmers understand the systems they work on. My guess is that'd amount to an incredible upgrade.

(Yes that level of understanding is often quite poor in absolute terms.)

But that's part of the issue, I'm not reading a blog post from 2013, I'm reading recent studies in top shelf medical journals with clear conclusions.

I may not understand the minutia of the study, but if the conclusions are "60% of people with X showed the underlying cause Y", and my doctor is saying "I have never heard of any possible association with Y, and Y has no possible connection anyway" then I feel pretty confident that the doctor is out of touch.

Rather the doctors take should be "Please send me the studies and I will review them with my actual medical knowledge" or really "I need to review the literature on this patients illness so I can be up to date while treating them for it"

That’s the promise of AI in medical care, that it can synthesize all known data relevant to observed symptoms and, on average, make a more accurate diagnosis than human doctors.

https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-diagnoses-disease-better-t...

The old joke: "The difference between doctors and programmers is that programmers actually admit to finding all their answers on the internet!'

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