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Two separate doctors have almost killed my wife with incorrect diagnoses over the span of 15 years.

She had cancer when she was 18 and the doctor insisted that women just don’t get cancer at that age, and insisted the lump was benign without testing it. We got another doctor to remove it, and it turns out it was stage 1 cancer.

A decade ago she was in crippling pain right in the gall bladder area. The doctor insisted it was indigestion. We found another doctor (thank goodness for PPOs letting us go directly to specialists without a referral) who did an ultrasound and said my wife probably had less than a week before she would suffer a rupture, and she had to have emergency surgery.

I’m glad you haven’t had that experience, but it’s a very real problem.

The inverse of this is people blowing off doctors then dying from very preventable illnesses, which I wager is orders of magnitude more common.

That's not to say that you should just believe doctors. If someone is telling you something isn't a big deal but you think it is, then get a second opinion.

It's especially common for women, particularly young women, to not be taken seriously. The implication is that young people are healthy, and women are over dramatic. Well... they're not always. I, for one, got cancer in my 20s.

The reason, I think, doctors are like this is because they want to err on the side of caution. They don't want to put people on medication unless they're 100% sure. They don't want to put people through anxiety-inducing tests for kicks. They don't want to cut people open unless it's the absolute last resort. And I can understand that mentality to a degree.

Not true in my experience. Just because a doctor has gone to medical school doesn't mean they are good at debugging/troubleshooting. I've had many doctors try to diagnose my chronic issues with guesswork and hunches instead of methodically eliminating possibilities with tests. I had to switch doctors many times to find one good enough to diagnose my condition (LADA aka type 1.5 diabetes). I actually asked the first doctor if it could be LADA and he said "nah, I don't think so", so then I asked if we could test for it to rule it out and again he declined and confidently encouraged me to exercise more and eat fewer carbs.

So you found a doctor to agree with your preconceived diagnosis and he's the one who is right, while the others were wrong?

You're intentionally ignoring the part about tests and methodical reasoning vs guesswork so you can be snarky about someone's take.

No but one of the things doctors learn is that when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

It's not practical to test for everything right away, and if an adult is overweight and presenting with diabetes you initally treat for type 2, and advise losing weight and changing diet.

Every medical school class has people who graduate near the bottom. The critera for entry, and the filters that you have to pass before you can practice as a physician means that even those people are generally decent doctors.

I'm not saying doctors are never wrong but you're not likely outguess even an average doctor by googling your symptoms. It's very easy to convince yourself you have some rare condition because your symptoms match, but you ignore "rare." The fact that someone has an anecdote to the contrary doesn't change this.

This is a much better comment with some thought behind it and a point at the end and without the snark. Thanks for adding it.

In my case I am very skinny (150 lbs, 6'0") which is the main reason that I thought I might have LADA and not T2 - my own research suggested that T2 was rare in skinny patients and that LADA might explain my elevated blood sugars (and also that up to 12% of T2 might actually be misdiagnosed LADA). So IMO the horse should have been LADA. However, LADA doesn't seem super well known or understood among doctors that haven't worked with a lot of pre-diabetic patients. This particular doctor claimed that my A1C would have been much higher than it was if I had LADA/T1 and that I was exhibiting symptoms of insulin resistance. I tried to argue that maybe we were catching it early and that insulin resistance and insulin deficiency present with the same symptoms (high blood sugar), but the doctor suspected I was non-compliant with the requested low-carb/exercise regiment and told me to try harder instead of ordering the tests and that I would see results if I did that.

I went to a second random doctor I found on ZocDoc who also thought I was T2, but then LADA was eventually confirmed by a third doctor who I chose specifically because he's worked with a lot of diabetic and pre-diabetic patients. He took one look at me and said "You look too skinny for a typical T2, let's run a GAD-65 autoantibody test", which came back 10x higher than the normal rate.

So yes, if you are a doctor and you hear hoofs I do think it's a good idea to think horses not zebras, but also if you've never actually worked with zebras, maybe have the humility to defer to a different doctor or listen to the patient who clearly has done more research than you about the condition they've struggled with for years instead of confidently pushing your wrong theory.

P.S. Early on in the process I also tried to see an endocrinologist (who probably also would have recognized LADA). However, they are a gated resource. I was unable to set an appointment with an endocrinologist without a recommendation from my PCP, and my PCP wouldn't give one. Just frustrating all around.

It's surprising how bad most people are at debugging. They make hypotheses but don't test them in isolation, so they can't reach conclusions. I see this everywhere, from IT issues to trying to fix a broken vacuum cleaner.

There should be a specific course on boolean logic in high school, distinct from math. Doesn't need to last a year; but needs to be graded separately from everything else.

The irony is how transferable these actual skills are, and often how intangible they are (difficult to measure, in a sense).

A few really good programmers/IT types I've worked with over the years were also very handy at auto repair, home repairs, and the like.

I guess, for a vague description, "root cause analysis", "isolation of the issue", and "reproducibility" are vitally important skills across domains.

My only "skills" in these domains are software stuff and some auto repair/troubleshooting and the process is nearly identical.

Any good doctor will tell you that you should be an advocate for your own care. That includes asking questions when something does seem right or doesn't make sense. You don't have to be a doctor to tell them they marked the wrong limb to be removed in surgery or ask why they recommend one treatment over another.

You sound like someone who was lucky enough to only meet good doctors.

Bad doctors, that really don’t give a shit, exist and are doing well, at least where I live, because there simply isn’t enough doctors.

The ratio good to bad doctors is the same as good to bad contractors in my experience.

I fully understand how annoying it is to be challenged by a patient as a doctor but why would the doctor do that with his contractor and not accept that from the patient? Because he’s more of an expert? I’d argue he’s less of an expert actually, because medicine is so insanely complex and we know so incredibly little of it.

> Doctors, unlike lawyers, typically care about your care

Yes but doctors, like laywers, often err on the side of caution. I don't want to be cut open unless absolutely necessary.

Maybe the approach is simply to ask for a second, expert opinion rather than trying to make your own. But asking pointy questions can't hurt (within reason, of course; you don't want to be the guy "doing their own research" (even if you are)).

This approach seems more like an overreaction to bro-science/anti-vaccine crowd. Like you arrived here by deciding to trust doctors more, since others don't trust doctors enough.