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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I've talked about it here many times, so I'll be terse. I really hate when I go to the doctor that they just sit there and type the whole time. Barely even look me in the eye. On more than one occasion I have had my doctor literally just Google my symptoms.

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My experience as a software engineer tells me that there's a positive correlation between frequency of googling and caliber of engineer, I have no reason to presume that would be any different with doctors.

> On more than one occasion I have just had my doctor literally Google my symptoms.

There have been times I wished they would have done that.

I expect them to be resourceful rather than know everything off the top of their head.

Med student here: oftentimes the attendings who are googling are usually doing it because the patient's symptoms don't fit with the most common illness "scripts" we develop in our mind and have ready for the 90% of patients who walk in the door. The google is a quick sanity check to see if these symptoms are within the range of "normal" for the most likely differential diagnoses (i.e. list of most likely diagnoses based on the patient's presentation).

That or those symptoms are exceptionally vague or uncommon enough that they warrant a quick refresher on google for leads on additional questions we should ask of patients (the most common offender here is rashes/skin lesions imo since they can literally be a manifestation of super simple "oh you just changed your shampoo" to "you have a rare autoimmune condition"...asking a comprehensive history from patients can help determine what tests to order).

That’s still way better than being told to take two Panadol and come back in the morning if your symptoms don’t improve. I mean, 99% of the time it’s a seasonal virus and that’s all you could/should do, but 0.1% of the time it’s meningitis and if you don’t go to the ICU then you die.

and so here is the problem of personalised care in a system where you can see upwards of 30 unfamiliar people a day: sometimes patients would rather I look things up, and others hate the idea of me touching any sort of technology in their presence, and it's nigh-impossible to tell which they are until a good way through the interview.

Medical scribes and ambient clinical intelligence systems that automatically transcribe doctor-patient conversations are addressing this exact problem, allowing doctors to maintain eye contact while still capturing necessary documentation.

Just replace typing with voice recognition, and you've got the perfect AI doctor already!

Patient talks about symptoms, doctor returns a markdown-formatted prescription. Charge by the number of tokens.

Soon we'll have the holographic doctor as seen in Star Trek Voyager.

Science fiction, particularly space operas, can be dismissive of doctors. Most of the time the "doctor" is just a diagnostic machine that gives miracle meds and maybe 3d prints new body parts.

Maybe it's prophetic: authors saw the writing on the wall and decided a doctor is a glorified mechanic who works on the most boring machine around (which hasn't changed in 100k years). Or maybe authors just decide the space was better filled by an ex-space-ninja or similar.

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