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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

I was left wondering:

- What the hell can be so complicated about "explaining an acne medication to a patient"? It can't be hard to use. Is it the risks associated? How to respond to numerous reactions and side effects?

- Why did it take a dermatologist (which would put her in the ~90th percentile of intelligence) so long to realize she was repeating the same thing over and over and over, and that this could therefore be automated?

- If a video -- not interactive tutorial -- fully replaces everything her in-person explanation provides, then she must not have been getting questions from patients, which makes me wonder how much of it they were actually following and was informative to them.

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> Why did it take a dermatologist (which would put her in the ~90th percentile of intelligence) so long to realize she was repeating the same thing over and over and over, and that this could therefore be automated?

IANAL & IANAD, but I'd wager small sums of real money that there are tons of legal implications around a doctor explaining how to use a medicine vs handing it off to a machine or even a nurse or other medical practitioner. Think: "my doctor didn't properly explain how this medicine would interact with this other medicine and as a result I was harmed, now I feel that my doctor should be held liable." Were I a doctor, that would probably be the very first thought in my mind immediately following how to automate an otherwise time-consuming process.

There are also considerations about ease of access. To a technologically lay person, the perceived complication and costs around a professionally edited instructional video can seem insurmountable or not cost-effective.

It's complicated to go through all the allegations of risk, which are almost all unsupported by serious studies. The birth defects are absolutely a huge risk, but the allegations of depression etc are unfounded. Most dermatologists agree that those studies were supported by accutane competitors, and that fair studies show the drug actually reduces depression (by removing the stressing factor of acne).

Because most doctors are not focused on tech. There are probably a lot of smart things you could do that have nothing to do with tech that you just wouldn't think about.

The video doesn't replace everything. It covers the bases and then sometimes a small number of questions remain. She used to get a ton of interrupting questions - she knows the common questions and touches on all of them in the video. Sometimes one-off questions remain.

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