[storus]

It's quite terrible how the medical "debugging" works or rather doesn't. You run a bunch (at best) of tests then pick the most probable diagnosis and that's about it for 99.9% of cases. And then in a review you measure that the world's best performing doctor hit 45% accuracy whereas an average one hits ~33%.

[dimal]

As someone who has been debugging their own chronic illnesses for the past ten years (and doing better than my doctors), I wouldn’t consider the medical diagnostic process to be “debugging” at all. And that is exactly the problem. Doctors seem to be stuck thinking like bureaucrats following probabilistic flowcharts, and they’re incapable of actually thinking about a problem and debugging it.

The behavior seems to be so deeply ingrained in every single doctor I’ve seen that it seems impossible to change. I suspect they must have this drilled into them in school and residency, then it seems like every decision is constrained by insurance requirements. As far as I can tell, the situation is hopeless.