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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance describes how motorcycle maintenance by the owner is qualitatively different from motorcycle maintenance by a professional mechanic. The professional mechanic can examine the motorcycle at a single point in time, but the owner rides the motorcycle and can collect observations as the motorcycle runs.

Understanding your body can be similar. While medical expertise is absolutely worth consulting, doctors can only base their diagnoses on your self-reported symptoms and on their examinations at single points in time. The more data you collect and report to the doctor, the more likely you can work out exactly what's going on.

I know someone who lived with chronic discomfort, observed over several years, and after many doctor visits finally pinpointed the root cause. Best wishes to the author on his search.

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The author explicitly mentions they collected all this data hoping it would be valuable to the specialists they have seen, but found they consistently were uninterested in it — an experience I can say is nearly universal for chronic illness sufferers I know in the US.

doctors don't have any experience doing that and are set in their ways

Maybe, it's diagnosing chronic conditions is an opportunity for a disruptive startup?

Crowd sourced diagnosis detective work!

Call it DrHouse.io, you dump your data and hobbyist doctor investigators try to figure a diagnosis that fits all the symptoms

Top ranking users collect mad fees from "commissioned" diagnosis.

Sounds like a site that would fill up immediately with diagnoses of wifi exposure, delayed vaccine reaction, and chemical exposure from chemtrails.

hey, that's a niche too

just tag it in a non-offensive way (deep-state related?) and allow other users to filter it out

There was an Obama era initiative called precision medicine, sometimes called personalized medicine and one of the people spearheading it was a software guy. I sometimes fantasize about using my good debugging skills to heal people. It is like Dr. House. But look up precision medicine.

Persig argues that the problem is more than just point in time vs continuous, it's that the typical mechanic doesn't care, they are neither careful nor interested. It's the same with doctors. Unless you have something straightforward: a tumor, a broken bone, a bacterial infection, etc... it is quite difficult to get a doctor _interested_ in solving a difficult problem. They don't have time for you and they aren't interested in subtlety.

If your problem can't be addressed with antibiotics or pain meds, then it's "let's try SSRIs for the next six months and see how it works".

> It's the same with doctors. Unless you have something straightforward: a tumor, a broken bone, a bacterial infection, etc... it is quite difficult to get a doctor _interested_ in solving a difficult problem. They don't have time for you and they aren't interested in subtlety.

I didn't realise how true this was until I started trying to obtain treatment for asthma that is slightly different from the apparently easy kind. I literally had a doctor get raise-his-voice angry with me because he thought a medicine should treat my asthma, but it measurably had no effect. Anyway, I saw a summary re-posted on Imgur, probably from Twitter, that I think summed it up:

> doctors in medical dramas when a patient has a mystery illness: I must examine every symptom and run every test! I won't rest until I've cracked this case!

> doctors irl when a patient has a mystery illness: hmm, have you considered that you're faking it?

Shoutout for Zen -- it's one of my top ten books and I love it to death. The discourse on the nature of quality fundamentally changed how I perceive the world and interact with it: when someone likes something I dislike, I remember that quality is the interface between the observer and the observed, and there's no right or wrong to that (beyond the extreme/obvious cases). I learned that from Pirsig, and I'm grateful.

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