[_delirium]

I agree on the last part there that there is lots the average person doesn't know. But one can also easily overestimate the knowledge specialists have, as they often don't have that knowledge either. Most doctors I know shudder at the thought of entrusting their lives to many of their med-school colleagues, and will off-the-record go on and on about how many doctors are 10+ years out of date with their knowledge of current medical literature, and how much cargo-cult "well this is how we do things" medicine is still prevalent, despite the attempts of EBM to wipe it out. Most also recommend that I do my own research before believing any doctor, though that isn't the advice they give their own patients.

I don't think it would necessarily be the case that a smart person with access to a good library couldn't do a better job self-diagnosing for a wide variety of routine conditions, especially since they would be willing to put in more research than the average doctor does. We're not talking about performing your own heart surgery, but more like the 80%+ of cases where the correct thing to do is a relatively routine decision that depends more on diligence in research and being informed about current best practices, than on any specialized skill. There are computer programs that can outperform the average physician in many areas (though not necessarily the top doctors; but you aren't likely seeing the top doctors, either). The self-diagnoser also has one key advantage, in that they are (presumably) only interested in their own well-being, not in defensive medicine and fear of malpractice suits.

Of course, it does require being a relatively level-headed person who knows how to read the relevant literature. Excitable folks, people who have never read an academic-sounding paper, and hypochondriacs are probably all better off not self-diagnosing.

[andymism]

I agree that, in general, you should educate yourself about what your doctor is telling you and push back a little bit. It's probably a good practice of any thinking person.

Routine conditions are a case where self-diagnosing will yield adequate results most of the time. But outside of the most common conditions, a smart but not medically trained person will end up treating symptoms rather than causes. A good example is blood pressure. You can walk into any pharmacy and find out within a minute if you have high blood pressure. For 80% of cases, you could probably just look up the most popular generic medication, start at a low dose and adjust a month at time until your blood pressure is normal. But what about the underlying cause? It could be an endocrine system problem, enlarged heart, arterial narrowing of the blood vessels from the kidneys, or ion channel exchange imbalances, to name a few. It is routine for a general practitioner to check for these and other causes and interpret the results of their tests, but is decidedly not routine for most smart people.

[ippisl]

I think you overestimate the ability to self diagnose objectively. i heard that medical students , while learning about medical conditions , start to see symptoms in themselves , and believe they have all kind of illnesses.

So collaborating with your doctor seems like a better path(especially since he has access to various tests).

[fnid2]

It's called "Medical Student Syndrome." I learned about it in psychology class because it happens there too.

[yummyfajitas]

Or, we could give patients direct access to various tests without the permission of a doctor.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

How would that help? How would you know what tests to order? How do you interpret them? How do you know that if test A has a certain result, then test B should be ordered to check for cross correlation with something else?

It's really easy to say "just order my own tests" but the reality is that it would be pointless for most people except... trained medical staff!