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by JoeAltmaier 2378 days ago
Medicine is unlike engineering or law or anything else really.

Engineering is problem-solving.

Law is precedent arguing.

Medicine is process-driven, almost 100%. There's a correct (currently approved) way to approach each procedure. Practitioners have memorized thousands of them. They regularly review (in a sad weekend in a holiday inn meeting room with a dim projector and droning presenter) to keep their license current.

Agreed at the point of problem-solving (diagnosis) they've got muddy data and a few diagnostic decision-trees to follow. So they appear to be biased or opinionated.

1 comments

There is also doing the most good for most people. For every person who dies due to a misdiagnosed disease, there are 10,000 that were properly diagnosed with the less dangerous, cheaper to test for, and massively more likely illness. It would be irresponsible to take that decision tree to the farthest branch when it is almost certainly something simple.

I definitely feel for people doing diagnostics in this profession, you can't be right all the time. If you try, you're highly irresponsible.