|
The book How Doctors Think makes that point very explicit and provides some useful tips for working with your doctor(s) to get the best treatment. I highly recommend it to anybody and everybody, FWIW. Doctors are not infallible. Case in point: After having a heart-attack, my GP and my cardiologist have both recommended I generally avoid taking Ibuprofen. Apparently it has some possible negative cardiac implications. OK, so a while back I was at the ER for some random pain, and the ER doctor said "take Ibuprofen". I told her that my GP and cardiologist both said not to, due to the cardiac risk and she goes "Oh, really? I didn't know anything about that. I'll have to go look that up. Thanks for the tip". So yeah, even doctors don't always know everything. I mean, really, how could they? They're experts, sure, but their domain is too big, too vast, for any one to know all of it. It would be like expecting one of us to be an expert in all of C, C++, D, COBOL, Julia, R, Erlang, Forth, Haskell, Java, SQL, FORTRAN, Ada, Scala, and Clojure, AND know all about all of the latest libraries as they come out, AND know all about all of the newest emerging tools all the time. Nobody could possibly do that, and no one doctor can keep up with everything going on with medicine. |