[mwigdahl]

I'd qualify that: "...we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, _for any random condition_, than non-doctors."

The thing I think you're missing is that the resources to do good, deep research on a condition do exist, and the sufferer has very strong motivation to do that research and become very well informed in the etiology and treatment options. The doctor, less so. They have a lot of patients and a lot of demands on their time.

Will a good doctor put in the effort, do the research, and come up with a superior treatment plan? Certainly! But not all doctors will do this.

If you use the allegory of the pig and the chicken, the sufferer is the pig, the doctor is the chicken. It is reasonable that the average pig will put in more work and be better informed about their own condition than the average chicken.

[wildmanx]

The English language has a serious deficiency in the term "research".

You can do "research" by spending your days in a lab, formulating hypotheses, doing experiments, reading related academic work, drawing conclusions, publishing their findings.

You can do "research" by googling, reading blog posts and wikipedia articles, watching Youtube videos, following telegram links and possibly reading a popular-science book.

These two things are very different activities and produce very different bodies of knowledge. "Do your own research!" is a common sentiment in Covid skeptic circles. It doesn't mean being in a lab. It means following links in your Google bubble. That doesn't necessarily produce useful knowledge. Properly trained researchers are aware of things like confirmation bias, selection bias, recollection bias. The "I did my own research crowd" is not and suffers seriously from it.

Using the term with the doctor is blurring the line between both versions. They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", but they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

[inter_netuser]

> they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

Pompous credentialism.

This is a hacker forum. Are people outside of universities unable to learn computer science, applied math, sw dev? Sure, biomed is a different field, but that’s all it is. A different knowledge base, there are more and more biomed hackers out there too, not to mention quite a few patients are PhDs and MDs themselves.

Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Nice set of preconceived notions and biases there, fellow researcher.

[wildmanx]

> Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Wow, it's hard to misconstrue my post more than that. Impressive!

Of course there are patients with more clue than the average patient. And of course there are incompetent doctors. But the common doctor is more educated in the medical field than the common patient.

Don't believe that? Next time you have surgery, just demand that instead of the surgeon, the next patient in the waiting room does the surgery on you. That's roughly what you are babbling about. Nothing they couldn't learn with a bit of youtube, eh?

> despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

The post you replied to literally contains the words 'They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", '

[PebblesRox]

For anyone else who isn't familiar with the Pig and Chicken story:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig