This is about the most charitable thing I've ever read on this site about physicians.
As a physician with a degree in nutrition, I find most HN threads about medicine, nutrition, or the health system very frustrating, and in spite of it being the only area in which I'm formally qualified to opine, it's also where I've earned most of my downvotes (which prior to 500 internet points kind of mattered). I eventually learned to just bite my tongue here.
Curiously, I think my "hacker spirit" is what drove me to medicine. In undergrad, I was spending 5+ hours per day reading medical literature (mostly nutrition, endocrinology, exercise science) and had decided that doctors were mostly idiots, and eventually decided to change majors from ME to pre-med.
In medical school, I was a real handful to many of the lecturers, which I kind of regret now. Ends up it is really easy to publicly humiliate someone when they mis-state or misunderstand a minor detail that you've studied in depth, even if they have far greater expertise in the field.
In medical school, residency, and practice (EM), I've learned a lot about why things are the way they are. In my field, many patients are entirely obsessed about some problem and completely lose track of reality when discussing it. It becomes part of their identity. They don't know how to read or evaluate medical literature, and they lack the background knowledge to the extent that even beginning a discussion is onerous.
It's like your uncle who is far to one side or the other of the political spectrum and is well read but only in support of his biases -- yes, you might learn something this time, but do you really want to get into long discussion to find out? He already "knows" all the answers to many unstudied questions, and knows why the studies are wrong for the others. There are so many of these patient encounters that it is entirely infeasible to engage with even a small proportion of them and still get your job done, so you learn to nod, smile, and move on to determining whether or not a life-threatening emergency exists or not. You definitely don't have time -- at least in my field -- to really listen and consider all of these. Unfortunately it's not always easy to differentiate symptoms that are possibly psychological, exaggerated, self-limiting, or impractical / impossible to diagnose in my clinical context, from those that present opportunities for me to make a difference even if not a true emergency.
I still think that many doctors are idiots that lack critical thinking skills and self-reflection, and unfortunately almost nobody outside of academics reads primarily literature that isn't forced on them (MOC). I've tried to show many friends and colleagues how to set up RSS feeds for pubmed queries for their topics of interest -- zero people have seemed impressed. In contrast, I think much of HN leans heavily on representativeness heuristic and doesn't consider likelihood ratios when evaluating their test results.
As a physician with a degree in nutrition, I find most HN threads about medicine, nutrition, or the health system very frustrating, and in spite of it being the only area in which I'm formally qualified to opine, it's also where I've earned most of my downvotes (which prior to 500 internet points kind of mattered). I eventually learned to just bite my tongue here.
Curiously, I think my "hacker spirit" is what drove me to medicine. In undergrad, I was spending 5+ hours per day reading medical literature (mostly nutrition, endocrinology, exercise science) and had decided that doctors were mostly idiots, and eventually decided to change majors from ME to pre-med.
In medical school, I was a real handful to many of the lecturers, which I kind of regret now. Ends up it is really easy to publicly humiliate someone when they mis-state or misunderstand a minor detail that you've studied in depth, even if they have far greater expertise in the field.
In medical school, residency, and practice (EM), I've learned a lot about why things are the way they are. In my field, many patients are entirely obsessed about some problem and completely lose track of reality when discussing it. It becomes part of their identity. They don't know how to read or evaluate medical literature, and they lack the background knowledge to the extent that even beginning a discussion is onerous.
It's like your uncle who is far to one side or the other of the political spectrum and is well read but only in support of his biases -- yes, you might learn something this time, but do you really want to get into long discussion to find out? He already "knows" all the answers to many unstudied questions, and knows why the studies are wrong for the others. There are so many of these patient encounters that it is entirely infeasible to engage with even a small proportion of them and still get your job done, so you learn to nod, smile, and move on to determining whether or not a life-threatening emergency exists or not. You definitely don't have time -- at least in my field -- to really listen and consider all of these. Unfortunately it's not always easy to differentiate symptoms that are possibly psychological, exaggerated, self-limiting, or impractical / impossible to diagnose in my clinical context, from those that present opportunities for me to make a difference even if not a true emergency.
I still think that many doctors are idiots that lack critical thinking skills and self-reflection, and unfortunately almost nobody outside of academics reads primarily literature that isn't forced on them (MOC). I've tried to show many friends and colleagues how to set up RSS feeds for pubmed queries for their topics of interest -- zero people have seemed impressed. In contrast, I think much of HN leans heavily on representativeness heuristic and doesn't consider likelihood ratios when evaluating their test results.
Anyway, thanks for the considerate comment.