8 ms·

Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a textbook

by bhrt0 10y ago

Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a textbook answer?

chris_7 10y ago
The idea of a doctor who is unsure giving an answer instead of taking time to research is scary. Maybe that's why misdiagnosis is so common: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148 http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148
- fma 10y ago
  "Despite these statistics, many doctors are reluctant to report diagnostic errors, even anonymously, despite the likelihood of moderate to severe harm on the patient" Not sure why doctors don't look after their patients. Is it because there is no incentive to? If they do bad diagnosis that means the patient comes back and the doctor gets more money. As long as they don't get sued there's really no harm to the doctor. As a software engineers we are incentivized to perform well. A crappy system means time spent debugging issues, money lost for our employer. We also take pride in building good systems so we can take that experience to the next company and get s higher wage or position.
arglebarnacle 10y ago
That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does. Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.
- bhrt0 10y ago
  > it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? And not every doctor is dealing with serious life threatening illnesses, just like not all developers are working on bootstrapping their uber for cats with Angular 2 and pouchdb.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    It's crucial because people can die. That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.
    - aries1980 10y ago
      > It's crucial because people can die Not every illness is lethal, for most of them you can just make it worse. Even less requires quick decision. Also, software evolves and scales much quicker than humans which makes our industry less standardised. > That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change. In my world, there is a risk assessment which defines if we have time to research, test, etc. or just fix it on the go, because it is not a big deal if it occurs. In other cases we have a cold sweat and dead silence during deployment, don't we?
  - bsder 10y ago
    > Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? Because you can't google every single symptom. And sometimes the symptom is only mentioned very briefly in passing. And sometimes the patient is hiding the symptom. And sometimes the important piece of information isn't a "symptom". So, you need to have these in your head so that you can connect the dots to "I thought it was X, but new data Y suggests it might be Z. I need to go push on abdomen, put stethoscope to stomach, right now while patient is sitting in my office." A good example of a non-symptom that would go into your diagnosis--patient just got divorced and started dating again ... hmmm, STD's are probably back in the probability pool again, might want to check for one given the other symptoms. Where computers are useful, but, sadly, we don't have good implementation is spotting localized trends. If one person comes down with Karposi's Sarcoma, that's an anomaly. If 10 people come down with it, that's a problem. It would be good to have databases with data from multiple doctors so that we could let the computers spot those things.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Who said anything about... feeling "hurt"?
CapitalistCartr 10y ago
And yet, in spite of their extensive training, computers are better at diagnosing.
- bhrt0 10y ago
  You think software for those computers that are better at diagnosing was created by engineers who don't know the difference between a stable and unstable sorting algorithm?
  - donw 10y ago
    There is a massive delta between knowing that, and being able to code examples of each from memory on a whiteboard during an interview. Also, it may surprise you, but there are many highly experienced and extremely capable programmers that didn't study computer science in college. Filtering those people out because they can't answer programming trivia questions is, at best, hugely short-sighted.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    If you're writing diagnosis software, your approach to sorting should be "use sort()". Sorting is not your core competency, diagnosis is.
  - bsder 10y ago
    I have discovered over and over that most genuinely good things are created by one smart person. After that person creates it, then the masses can run with it. Bittorrent is a great example. All the pieces had existed for a while, but Bram Cohen put them all together into one place. After that, lots of people created other BitTorrent clients. However, without that first, smart person, it wouldn't have appeared.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Actually, yes. It's very likely that the core algorithms for these systems were written by "crossover" types (e.g. math PhDs) who are perfectly capable of getting up to speed with the esoteric aspects of these systems, without having to go back and master the standard undergraduate CS curriculum. It's called being flexible and able to learn, and it's the single most important thing you're supposed to get out of your formal education.
EliRivers 10y ago
In my experience (which is from asking friends who are medical doctors), their medical ability is not examined during the interview. There are no questions of this nature.

by bhrt0 10y ago

Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a textbook answer?

chris_7 10y ago

The idea of a doctor who is unsure giving an answer instead of taking time to research is scary. Maybe that's why misdiagnosis is so common: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148 http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148

fma 10y ago
"Despite these statistics, many doctors are reluctant to report diagnostic errors, even anonymously, despite the likelihood of moderate to severe harm on the patient" Not sure why doctors don't look after their patients. Is it because there is no incentive to? If they do bad diagnosis that means the patient comes back and the doctor gets more money. As long as they don't get sued there's really no harm to the doctor. As a software engineers we are incentivized to perform well. A crappy system means time spent debugging issues, money lost for our employer. We also take pride in building good systems so we can take that experience to the next company and get s higher wage or position.

arglebarnacle 10y ago

That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does. Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.

bhrt0 10y ago
> it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? And not every doctor is dealing with serious life threatening illnesses, just like not all developers are working on bootstrapping their uber for cats with Angular 2 and pouchdb.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  It's crucial because people can die. That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.
  - aries1980 10y ago
    > It's crucial because people can die Not every illness is lethal, for most of them you can just make it worse. Even less requires quick decision. Also, software evolves and scales much quicker than humans which makes our industry less standardised. > That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change. In my world, there is a risk assessment which defines if we have time to research, test, etc. or just fix it on the go, because it is not a big deal if it occurs. In other cases we have a cold sweat and dead silence during deployment, don't we?
- bsder 10y ago
  > Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? Because you can't google every single symptom. And sometimes the symptom is only mentioned very briefly in passing. And sometimes the patient is hiding the symptom. And sometimes the important piece of information isn't a "symptom". So, you need to have these in your head so that you can connect the dots to "I thought it was X, but new data Y suggests it might be Z. I need to go push on abdomen, put stethoscope to stomach, right now while patient is sitting in my office." A good example of a non-symptom that would go into your diagnosis--patient just got divorced and started dating again ... hmmm, STD's are probably back in the probability pool again, might want to check for one given the other symptoms. Where computers are useful, but, sadly, we don't have good implementation is spotting localized trends. If one person comes down with Karposi's Sarcoma, that's an anomaly. If 10 people come down with it, that's a problem. It would be good to have databases with data from multiple doctors so that we could let the computers spot those things.

kafkaesq 10y ago

Who said anything about... feeling "hurt"?

CapitalistCartr 10y ago

And yet, in spite of their extensive training, computers are better at diagnosing.

bhrt0 10y ago
You think software for those computers that are better at diagnosing was created by engineers who don't know the difference between a stable and unstable sorting algorithm?
- donw 10y ago
  There is a massive delta between knowing that, and being able to code examples of each from memory on a whiteboard during an interview. Also, it may surprise you, but there are many highly experienced and extremely capable programmers that didn't study computer science in college. Filtering those people out because they can't answer programming trivia questions is, at best, hugely short-sighted.
- chris_7 10y ago
  If you're writing diagnosis software, your approach to sorting should be "use sort()". Sorting is not your core competency, diagnosis is.
- bsder 10y ago
  I have discovered over and over that most genuinely good things are created by one smart person. After that person creates it, then the masses can run with it. Bittorrent is a great example. All the pieces had existed for a while, but Bram Cohen put them all together into one place. After that, lots of people created other BitTorrent clients. However, without that first, smart person, it wouldn't have appeared.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Actually, yes. It's very likely that the core algorithms for these systems were written by "crossover" types (e.g. math PhDs) who are perfectly capable of getting up to speed with the esoteric aspects of these systems, without having to go back and master the standard undergraduate CS curriculum. It's called being flexible and able to learn, and it's the single most important thing you're supposed to get out of your formal education.

EliRivers 10y ago

In my experience (which is from asking friends who are medical doctors), their medical ability is not examined during the interview. There are no questions of this nature.