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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Blindly trusting your doctor is dangerous, yet most people do.

I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy and, on top of that, Watson is not sensitive to external factors. This is a fantastic tool and may end up changing the way we interface with the health care system.

As a doctor I agree.

At medical school you learn to develop algorithms to deal with inputs and act upon the output.

Out of medical school you are meant to keep up to date with countless updates in clinical practice based on mountains of studies and publications. Plenty of data is not distributed.

This is a great step forward for medicine.

> I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy

It's a reasonable thought. When this has been studied at autopsy, however, doctors seem to be right 70-85% of the time (higher when very confident of the diagnosis) [1]. There are a bunch of studies that show this, and you can find many in the linked meta-analysis.

Of course, this focuses on things that can lead to death. If your doctor misdiagnosis RSV as metapneumovirus, you'll survive either way in all likelihood, so for some diseases we'll probably never know the true diagnostic accuracy.

[1] = http://www.pathkids.com/autopsy/hasleton%20on%20discrepancie...

another secret in medicine is that a lot of what patients come in for end up to be self-limiting anyhow; the patients just gets better on their own. in these cases, there may be misdiagnosis in there somewhere, but nobody would really care.

I know at least a few doctors (and one surgeon) who know they weren't in optimal condition at times because of personal issues. It's only human, but it's horrible if things go wrong because of that.

In general practice, you will find that doctors become less accurate as they get older; whereas in surgery, older doctors generally perform better with less complications. The reason is that the feedback loop in surgery is instant -- you do something wrong, you have to fix immediately -- wheas in general practice, it is often the case that the doctor never even knows of the prescribed treatment worked so the feedback is a lot "weaker". Therefore, I think Watson could be hugely beneficial and counter-balance the biases and decline in skills that plagues many doctors who work in general practice.

Well...

I don't.

And then other people get mad at me for that, I am kinda tired that every time I argue with a doctor (or that people find out that I did that), there are a argument about how I am not a student of medicine or a doctor and should not argue with them.

So there is kind a social pressure toward that.

But I still don't trust them anyway (because I have my symptoms, there are good research on the subject, and every time a doctor did what I nagged him to do, it worked, but they are too conservative to believe in the research until whatever council they obey tell them to do so, and some even that way still refuse to change)

Find better doctors. My doctors never argue from authority, and are willing to challenge some "research"

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