"Doctors are like monkeys with hammers trying to fix computers. We bang against stuff and will try a lot of things if we don't know what you've got. We may even get it right. But if you have a broken leg, an appendix that needs removal, a clear case of something that can be treated with anti-biotics, then we can perform small miracles."
I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.
Anecdotally this rings very true. Actually I'd be even more cynical than it. I know two people that were facing serious chronic health issues that were not readily diagnosed. They were treated like a hot potato between specialists.
In one case it took nearly 2 year to arrive at a correct diagnosis and corrective action, which involved both medication and surgery.
In the other case the person was moving into liver failure, and placed on the transplant list. Luckily a family friend worked for the same healthcare organization as an IT professional, and knew exactly what to do. She marched the patient into the ER, had her sit down in a wheel chair, and made it crystal clear that she was going to be a gigantic PITA until they found out what was killing the patient. Within the day they had a plausible answer, and confirmed it with lab results within the week as I recall.
It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately in US healthcare it is. Having an uncommon illness is an absolute nightmare, one that destroys entire families finances if not outright killing people.
This is unfortunately fairly accurate. There is a deep and wide ocean of the things we know inexactly, and a growing pool of things we can work miracles on.
However as the complexity of patients grows and the burden of disease shifts from infectious disease to chronic causes with lifestyle origins and aging, and anxiety - particularly in the teenage and young adults (a shift that has been underway at the top end for 30 years for the older part of the population, and since smartphones on the lower side! that the ocean is growing as well.
Thank you. I hold that person in very high regard and it stuck with me through the years as something that I see more and more confirmation of and yet, it seems to be a pretty harsh judgment.
I wouldn't be any less harsh about my own profession though.
> I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.
We see the medicine of 200 years ago as barbaric, and I can guarantee that people 200 years in the future will see today's medicine as barbaric. There is simply lots of room for improvement even if improvement has been made in the past, but why should that give us colored views of the whole field?
> There is simply lots of room for improvement even if improvement has been made in the past, but why should that give us colored views of the whole field?
Especially since most of us -- most readers here do something computer-related, right? -- are ourselves in an (even more rapidly) evolving field of work, where what's "true" is constantly changing.
"Doctors are like monkeys with hammers trying to fix computers. We bang against stuff and will try a lot of things if we don't know what you've got. We may even get it right. But if you have a broken leg, an appendix that needs removal, a clear case of something that can be treated with anti-biotics, then we can perform small miracles."
I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.