by rendaw | 2026-01-08 07:01:07+00:00
This is exactly my feelings! I think medicine is a crucial field, but I have very little respect for individual doctors themselves.

- Humans are self healing - if a doctor does absolutely nothing, most issues will resolve on their own or, if they're chronic (e.g. back pain) they won't be worse off compared to the alternative. I'm in a country with subsidised health care, and people go to the doctor immediately for absolutely anything. A doctor could have a 99% success record by handing out placebos.

- Most patients have common issues. I.e. maybe 30 people visit the clinic on a given day, it's possible that all 30 of them have come because they have the flu. Doctors are human, nobody's going to investigate potential pneumonia 30 times a day every day for 6 months. So doctors don't: someone comes in and is coughing, they say it's flu, on to the next patient. If the person really has pneumonia, they'll come back when it gets worse.

- Clinics are overbooked. I don't know if it's licensing, GDP, artificial scarcity, cost regulations or what, but doctors probably don't actually have time to investigate anyways.

- Doctors don't receive any rigorous continuing education. I'm sure there's some restrictions, but I've gone into doctors in the last year and gotten the "stress causes ulcers" explanation for what turned out to be food sensitivity issues (there was no visible ulcer mind you, so it was concluded that it was an invisible ulcer). Slow, gradual maintenance, and heavy reading are hard things that humans are necessarily bad at.

- Patients don't want to hear the truth. Lifestyle changes, the fact that nothing can be done, there's no pills to cure you, etc. Even if doctors could give a proper diagnosis, it could end up being bad PR so doctors are conditioned away from it.

- Doctors don't follow up - they get absolutely no feedback whether most of their treatments actually work. Patients also don't come back when their issue is resolved, but even if they do doctors don't care. Skin issue, doctor prescribed steroidal cream, redness disappeared, doctor declared I was cured, redness came back worse a week later. As a scientific field, there's no excuse for anything but evidence based medicine, but I haven't seen a single doctor even make an attempt to improve things statistically.

I've heard things like, doing tests for each patient would be prohibitively expensive (yes, but it should at least be an option and patients can pay for it) or the amount of things medicine can actually cure today is very small so the ROI would be low for additional work (yes, but in the long term the information could result in furthering research).

I think these are obvious and unavoidable issues (at least with the current system), but at the same time if a doctor who ostensibly became a doctor out of a desire to help people willingly supports this system I think they share some of the blame.

I don't trust AI. Part of me goes, well what if the AI suddenly demands I have some crazy dental surgery? And then I go, wait, the last dentist I went to said I need some crazy dental surgery. That none of the other 3 dentists I went to after that even mentioned. And as you said an AI will at least consider more info...

So I do support this as well. I'd like to have an AI do a proper diagnosis, then maybe a human rubber stamp it or handle escalation if I think there's something wrong...