4 ms·

> 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

by 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.
odbol_ 10y ago
I mean, my doctor usually just types my symptoms into Google anyway...

by bhrt0 10y ago

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.

odbol_ 10y ago

I mean, my doctor usually just types my symptoms into Google anyway...