it's really hard being a doctor. i have recently been trying to work out what is the best treatment with two doctors. both are decent, smart people who understand the current literature and who care about me. yet they came to quite different conclusions, and the arguments for either side are clear. there's just too little known about many illnesses (in my case, it's not mental, but ms) and you are left balancing risks and unknowns.

i am not sure what the answer is. i wonder if casting a much broader net, and collecting much more data, would help. maybe every patient should be tracked in some huge database that can then be trawled for correlations? but then the privacy (and insurance) implications are worrying - for me, it would not be such a hard choice, but others with more to lose would understandably object.

in some ways medicine has advanced hugely (for ~50% of sufferers, ms is no longer a big problem, which is awesome). yet there are sudden borders, and when you cross them, you are in the unknown...