[peterbonney]

My son was born _very_ premature, which gave me an intensive crash course on interacting with the medical system. I know two (mildly contradictory) things to be true about that experience: - My son would not be alive and healthy without the incredible care and expertise of his doctors and nurses, along with decades of scientific advancements on the treatment of prematurity. - Around the margins, his health outcomes would have been worse if my wife and I had simply trusted that same expertise without ever questioning decisions and pushing back on recommendations.

It’s so hard to have a nuanced conversation about the blind spots of our medical system. People want to force you into one of two buckets: you believe in medicine, or you believe in mysticism.

But there _are_ blind spots, because doctors are human and fallible, they aren’t generally experts in every subject that is useful for medical diagnosis (usually including statistics and often including genetics), and it isn’t just doctors themselves that are involved but a whole medical bureaucracy whose incentives don’t always align with optimal patient outcomes.