[Pigalowda]

You’re on the wrong forum to complain about the medical field. These SWE think you’re a privileged complaining brat (ironic) who breezed through the 15 years of school and training and don’t deserve anything but disrespect. You’re part of the medical cartel and for the most part, they despise you. Your salary is deemed too high and you are expensive overhead that needs to be decreased - hence the outrage and popularity of these articles here.

You must know this? Have you not seen their comments on HN medical threads? So vocal and often horribly wrong it would be comical if it wasn’t so depressing.

I’m not going to one up you with my own sob story, but it’s like you say for all of us everywhere in the US - but you can really only complain to other MDs. Outsiders will demand you work more, get paid less, get sued more, and grovel. They hate us, so don’t complain to them. In the end they will get what they want - automated service by LLM combined with other diagnostic software and nursing. They will then complain for the return of the human physician. It’s so typical.

You are perfectly suited to giving them automated service. Just spitballing and probably wrong - have an optho specific app with an LLM and maybe a plug in smart phone device that has object detection/instance segmentation for diabetic retinopathy. Cataracts detection might be secondary? There’s plenty of products for retinopathy and looks like Inception networks do fine for cataracts. Other eye pathologies that are easily visually diagnosed are on the table too. Why see 40 patients when you could see 150 and the LLM/app have done the referral, initial screening questionnaire, and your nurses/MAs write your note/rx/orders etc. Ideally you should be like a dentist (they clearly figured this out already). You walk into the patient’s room do a quick eye exam, say what needs to happen, don’t answer any questions, and walk out. They hate you already anyways, might as well lean into it.

- Currently an imaging fellow in the cartel.

[belmarca]

Becoming a physician is a choice. Choosing your specialty is a choice as well (to an extent). Staying a physician is also a choice. And an immense privilege.

I have great respect for physicians I have worked with in IT for years. However I do not have patience for this sort of argument. You can always find another job if you'd like to, like everybody else. And unlike the majority of the population, you can set yourself up to have the financial freedom to do so.

No "sane" person "hates" doctors. They just don't pity them.

---

BTW, the tech FOMO is just FOMO. Grass is greener. Software engineering can be very exciting (just like medicine), but also very boring (just like medicine). Compensation is a really bad metric. If you value your time off, then don't become a physician. Sounds to me like some people just can't ever be fulfilled (usually the more privileged)!

[MobiusHorizons]

In my experience, most of the outrage against the medical system is that it is so expensive, and has such variable outcomes. I don’t think overworking doctors (even more than they already are) is the solution, but I do feel something has to give. What do you think is the problem. What could be productively changed that would make access to healthcare more affordable?

[nradov]

The simplest thing we could do to make access to healthcare more affordable is that Congress could increase Medicare funding for residency program slots. That would boost the number of practicing physicians within a few years.

https://savegme.org/

[iancmceachern]

The simplest thing they could do would be to get rid of insurance companies. They add no value to the system, but take plenty

[haldujai]

I remain optimistic that some people here are open to learning so I still try sometimes.

- Also a radiologist who gets told I’m egregiously overpaid when [insert immature AI tech] can definitely do my job better.

[Pigalowda]

I am not optimistic here. This is the lion’s den - I’m here to see what the predators have in store for us. Back in early residency it exposed me to CNN and real time object detectors and a co-resident and I made a little proof of concept app that detects ICD/PM on CXR.

So I think there’s value to me here - just no value in proselytizing and apologetics. They don’t like us and are here to eliminate us.

[haldujai]

I don’t view it as adversarial. I’ve had productive conversations on HN including some which gave me NLP approaches I hadn’t considered.

Engineers (including myself when I had a health-tech startup before my MD) tend to misunderstand the problem space (simply put they consider radiology a classification task and assume ground truth labels exist/are even possible like for object recognition) so it seems easy to them, but I don’t believe the intent is nefarious.

Perhaps it’s my naivety but I think most smart people at least partly care at improving society on some level (even if they want to make a lot of money doing it) and the physician-services budget is a large line-item that seems like an easy target rather than the ??? to improve inefficiencies and outcomes.

Without a doubt the AI-enabled radiologist will render the non-AI rad obsolete but it won’t replace our profession. I don’t believe anyone with the skillset and experience in the relevant AI tech believes that it will eliminate radiologists (other than maybe Hinton), certainly isn’t the attitude of the pure CS supervisors I’ve had in my training (or the folks I collaborate with now).

[speakfreely]

> They don’t like us and are here to eliminate us.

Don't take it personally. They're even trying to eliminate themselves [0].

[0] https://github.com/features/copilot

[labcomputer]

Cry me a river. How horrible it must be to have perfect job security, as close as you can get to tenure, unless you massively fuck up. Oh, and an automatic 1% salary.

> but you can really only complain to other MDs. Outsiders will demand you work more, get paid less, get sued more, and grovel.

Oh yes, this is exactly what I want. I don't care about anything my GP does, except whether they kiss my feet when I schedule an appointment. How do you know me so well?