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Comment by gte910h | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.

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"

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 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.

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.

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...

Because the second line sounds sarcastic.

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.

>Yeah you're way off here.

You read my comment exactly backwards.

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.

>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.

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.

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