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"The best doctors are the quickest to Google." "The best scientists are the quickest to Google." "The best engineers are the quickest to Google."

Are the above statements true? Quite possibly. I would argue that the best in their fields are those writing the answers that are indexed by Google to be found by others. However, usually the best in their fields are also good at using Google. Unfortunately, the worst in their fields also use Google extensively, so it's not a strong signal.

EDIT: My definition of "best" is admittedly very subjective. The author could define "best" as "most effective", for exmaple. My only point is that you shouldn't use Googling to determine who is "best" because the "worst" also can be quick to use Google. It's a useless signal. More situationally appropriate metrics should be used instead.

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My doctor said "I don't know, I have to go look that up".

He's probably going to stay my doctor for a very long time for that one sentence.

I don't know, it's almost a little unnerving to think that a doctor would always go completely from memory and never look at any reference material.

That's what parent said.

Two commenters read my comment backwards. Wonder why.

Because the second line sounds sarcastic.

apologies.. I completely inverted the meaning of your comment... and yeah, I think the other commenter is right.. the second line would be an appropriately sarcastic response if it actually said what my brain interpreted it as.

That said, given the number of upvotes, it seems like a ton of people misread your comment as well.. quite interesting...

I suffer from a cross disciplinary illness, in which very few doctors have experience (because it doesn't fit into one of the major well defined specialties). You can't imagine how happy it makes me when a doctor tells me "I have to go look that up", as opposed to.. no.. there's nothing to worry about, you're just imagining that, or whatever

Absolutely. Doctors are particularly egoistic and don't deal well with long-tail problems. But that doesn't make yours the best doctor; the best doctor wrote the original material. Willingness to research the answer just makes your doctor an effective doctor, because they ultimately deliver the correct answer.

the best doctor wrote the original material

I agree with everything else in your comment, but that doesn't make sense. How do you arrive at that conclusion?

I am, admittedly, handwaving here. "Best" is so subjective that's hard to define, so I define it as "the ones who move the field forward with original work." In other contexts it could mean something completely different.

I see. Well I'd differentiate between a researcher and a clinician. The best researcher may not be the doctor you want diagnosing and treating you.

I agree... but the "best" doctor is also 5k miles away from me, and out of my immediately budget, since insurance doesn't cover it.. so.. I'll settle for "effective"

No single doctor wrote the original material. The doctor who wrote the original material for one area may be completely useless outside his area and ineffective at looking them up.

Yeah you're way off here. If my doctor said "I don't look things up" I'd run out the door. A doctor who looks things up is a doctor who cares to get things right.

Depends on the situation - a doctor can take his time during say, a cancer diagnosis, but not in the ER.

Do you want a doctor who's trying to patch up your innards after a serious accident to look up where your pancreas is located?

Inexperience leads to a lot of wasted time searching for things along the way. The more you know in your head, the better.

If I were going in for surgery, however, I would like my surgeon to have recently researched the best current way to perform whatever he is going to do.

The surgeon (or programmer) who thinks he knows everything isn't the best one for the job.

>Do you want a doctor who's trying to patch up your innards after a serious accident to look up where your pancreas is located

Do I want a surgeon who'd stop look something up and rescrub if that was the best thing to do? YES.

That inexperienced guy is going to get experience at one time, perhaps on me. If he needs to stop, and the stopping is less dangerous than him NOT stopping, I want the stop to occur.

Do I want a fucking moron who can't do basic parts of his job, of COURSE not.

>Yeah you're way off here.

You read my comment exactly backwards.

I think that is cultural;

a practician in Latin countries (in Europe) would loose any credibility by acknowledging they have to check a knowledge base (although it does make sense). In a similar fashion a teacher would literally loose face in front of his student for recognizing he does not know the answer to a question on his subject from the top of his head.

That said, and by experience, I have seen plenty doctors checking their books on illness to match symptoms, but they did that in such a serious manner, you would believe they were just needing confirmation of memorized knowledge. Whereas I have seen plenty teachers/lecturers just dismissing the answer as obvious or the question as irrelevant.

> Are the above statements true?

Yes. Google not strictly being Google itself, but searching other resources. Doctors do research. Scientist read papers. Everyone references something else.

So don't think of it as merely Googling because you don't know. It's Googling because you know someone else has solved this, or something similar, and you want apply someone else's knowledge to what you are doing.

Absolutely.

My doctor, who is a hotshot young doctor at a hotshot medical school, impressed me by telling me she needed to look up my symptoms and then showing me what she found (and, to be fair, also referring me to an expert).

Depending on field, part of being an expert is also knowing where to look for field-specific expert information. Google is a much better search engine than the NCBI PubMed interface, but I know as a biomedical scientist that I should use PubMed or else I'll miss important research.

(Though part of being a scientist is also realizing that you're trying to understand totally new results, and google is of no use past some point. I imagine this is also true of engineers. You're building on previous work but at some point you have to move past what's been done before.)

My friends daughter was born with a lung disorder that showed up in the first week after leaving the hospital. The local hospital almost killed her in incorrect diagnosing and panic and she was emergency flighted to Childrens. Two of the doctors there quickly came back with a preliminary diagnosis of congenital lobar emphysema after a few internet searches on the symptoms. They had printed what information they could find off of a few websites at the time. Based on that they talked to surgeons that had experience in the field and within a day the surgery had been performed and all was well.

What I see is 3 information tiers. 1. You should know this off the top your head to be a professional. Common information, kind of like daily use of your first language. 2. Information that is not common or you shouldn't be expected to remember because of its rare usage. The type of information this thread is about. 3. Information you make, what you state at the end of this thread.

Google (and others like IsabelHealthCare) help you catch the zebras you missed while looking at the horses.

Since Google is written by programmers, it's a very good search engine for finding stuff about programming. I'm sure there are medical publications and search engines related to the medical field, and that 'Good' Doctors will quickly use them when something falls outside of their memorized knowledge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/health/quest-to-eliminate-...

Note: there is a diagnostic program named Isabel that would be the Google equivalent.

Any doctor who says he knows everything/a lot of things is plainly lying or just BS'ing his way through.

The doctor's way of googling is if the patient falls under common pattern of diseases, like say common cold, cough, fever etc kind of diseases or some thing like commonly known infection that is spreading around to everyone. Treating such patients is a cake walk as there is a well defined treatment protocol to follow that works flawlessly with near 100% success rate.

When faced with a disease rare enough to warrant deep diagnosis thought process and further investigation. They simply put the patient on a 'safe mode' go do their homework and come back Or send him to a specialist.

Emergency cases are a little different. But besides that anything beyond a well known problem, a general doctor will know as much as what a Google search would tell you.

Good doctors are pattern matchers. In complex cases they do research by reading books or asking others, but they already have a good idea in what's going on.

A doctor that can only recognize diseases like the common cold is not a good one. Your example is exaggerated and also, the patient may already be dead by the time the investigation is over, which is worsened by the fact that aggressive treatments (like strong antibiotics) can do even more damage, so a good doctor has to have a pretty good grasp on what's going on already.

>>Your example is exaggerated and also

No,

This is the normal trend here in India. And unfortunately lives are cheap here. Its not like in US that you can sue people, in other parts of the world things are a lot more different. There is practically no regulation in countries like India.

Well I wasn't talking about particular health-care systems, but rather about good doctors, of which you can find everywhere, albeit in a minority.

I don't live in the US. I live in Romania, which has a ruined public healthcare system, but even here I've met medical personnel that's worth their salt.

As an example my now 3-year old suffered from a severe allergic reaction called "Lyle's syndrome" (look it up). We went to the hospital in the early stages and the doctor that took the case immediately recognized it, even though at first it looked like some kind of severe cold/flu (coming in combination with tonsillitis and fever).

After several hours of being hospitalized, his skin pealed off in certain areas, but he was already on both antibiotics and corticoids and so the reaction wasn't so severe as it could have been (imagine your whole skin pealed off, with the same effect as second or third-degree burns). And the problem with weird allergic reactions is that antibiotics from the cephalosporins class or other medicine that produces allergic reactions can kill you.

Also, our doctor went basically blind for the whole time, because the blood tests you perform when the patient is under treatment are mostly useless, being used only to discover how well or not the patient is responding to treatment. For instance she discovered a bacterial infection, which is known to cause Lyle's syndrome, but was it an external infection that caused it or because of an imbalance of intestinal flora due to antibiotics? We also gave him antibiotics before hospitalizing him, that might have also caused this reaction. Lyle's syndrome is known to be caused by both antibiotics and bacterial infections.

The root cause in the case of Lyle's syndrome is extremely important because the treatment and severity of the reaction differs. Our doctor basically took a guess based on how his skin looked.

Probably, but they needn't advertise the fact. I go to a specialist for Cystic Fibrosis, and when one of my doctors responded to a question I had with "I Googled and learned that..." it didn't sit well with me.

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