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Yet another person with no experience in medicine, finally figured out how to "disrupt" medicine with technology. You can't practice medicine without knowledge

Yet another person with no experience in medicine, finally figured out how to "disrupt" medicine with technology. You can't practice medicine without knowledge. You can't learn how to practice medicine without knowledge. What knowledge is required? Physics, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, mathematics, microbiology, cellular biology, biochemical biology, molecular biology, developmental biology, physiology, pathophysiology, human anatomy, pharmacology, histology, gross pathology, statistical analysis, internal medicine, paediatric medicine, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, neurologic surgery, urologic surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, outpatient medicine, cardiology, pulmonology, nephrology, hepatology, radiology, neurology, psychiatry, critical care, healthcare economics, medical ethics, et cetera. If you don't have a knowledge base, you simply can not practice medicine because you don't understand how things actually work... Critical thinking without knowledge isn't critical thinking, it's ignorance.

analog31 8y ago
How does the brain work? Okay, that was sarcastic. But in my view no doctor knows all of those subjects in depth. Pre-med students take the basic STEM courses in order to pass their MCAT's, and then forget most of what they learned, and those courses were all just superficial intro courses anyway. To be fair, the same can be said of most engineers. Many med students (wisely) major in a STEM subject, so they may get into more depth than someone who majored in some kind of "studies." But what they know is a function of what they actually studied, learned, and kept up with after college, which does not make me super optimistic.
- assblaster 8y ago
  Since you haven't been through medical education and training, you wouldn't understand that while certain details are forgotten, the core knowledge that serves as the basis for further learning is retained. Do you remember every detail of your first grade education? Probably not, but it has served as a foundation for everything else you learned in life. How do you learn calculus if you don't learn numbers and letters?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
treis 8y ago
>If you don't have a knowledge base, you simply can not practice medicine because you don't understand how things actually work... Nonsense. Why does a heart surgeon need to know anything about psychiatry? What does a radiologist need to know about cellular biology? The equivalent for programming would be forcing someone to understand how transistors work at the atomic level, CPU architecture, and OS structure before letting them write a webapp. It's definitely one of the problems in medicine. There's way too much useless knowledge required leading to a limited supply of people being able and willing to master it. Plus, it makes it much more expensive and time consuming to train all of those people.
- riahi 8y ago
  As a radiologist, I have to know a lot about cellular biology to understand and predict the imaging manifestations of cellular disease. You can’t just delete the baseline foundational knowledge.
  - treis 8y ago
    >As a radiologist, I have to know a lot about cellular biology to understand and predict the imaging manifestations of cellular disease. A given radiologist shouldn't be predicting the imaging manifestation of cellular disease. They should be using their knowledge of how known diseases or conditions appear on scans to diagnose the issue. The people that need to understand things on a deeper level are the ones trying to devise new tests or scans to expand front line radiologists diagnostic abilities.
    - natalyarostova 8y ago
      It's pretty wild you're telling a practicing radiologist how they should be doing their job.
      - treis 8y ago
        One of the problems with letting people in a profession set the requirements for that profession is that they exaggerate them to limit competition and increase their earnings. You end up with things like radiologists saying they need to know cellular biology. It's simply ludicrous on its face. Radiology is a particularly egregious case. If it weren't for legal protection the profession would be dramatically different. It's obviously stupid to spend a bunch of time training them to interpret and diagnosis a bunch of different scans. Basic efficiency would be to train Person A to interpret chest X-Rays, person B to do CT scans, Person C for leg X-rays and have them spend all day doing that one thing. Instead, radiologists spend a decade learning how to interpret a hundred different things and spend 1/100 of their time on each of them.
mycorrhizal 8y ago
You are way overstating the knowledge of most practicing physicians. You are right that most of them learned about these topics at some point, but have quickly forgotten them. I worked with a pediatrician who works in under privileged areas and conducts public health research and she had forgotten the difference between a diploid and a haploid cell (for anyone not bio savvy this is bio 101) yet she still does a fine job treating patients and understands the problems of the communities she works in. Different people have different strengths and collaboration is all about enabling others to use their strengths. You do not need to learn most of the things on your list before you can make a positive contribution to medicine. Your list would exclude most physicians from contributing.
wl 8y ago
Yeah, med school/boards require you to memorize some trivia about some or all of those fields. That doesn't mean such knowledge is clinically useful. By necessity, most of that knowledge will be superficial because there is far too much to cover. The stuff that's useful will be retained, while the rest disappears.

analog31 8y ago

How does the brain work? Okay, that was sarcastic. But in my view no doctor knows all of those subjects in depth. Pre-med students take the basic STEM courses in order to pass their MCAT's, and then forget most of what they learned, and those courses were all just superficial intro courses anyway. To be fair, the same can be said of most engineers. Many med students (wisely) major in a STEM subject, so they may get into more depth than someone who majored in some kind of "studies." But what they know is a function of what they actually studied, learned, and kept up with after college, which does not make me super optimistic.

assblaster 8y ago
Since you haven't been through medical education and training, you wouldn't understand that while certain details are forgotten, the core knowledge that serves as the basis for further learning is retained. Do you remember every detail of your first grade education? Probably not, but it has served as a foundation for everything else you learned in life. How do you learn calculus if you don't learn numbers and letters?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

treis 8y ago

>If you don't have a knowledge base, you simply can not practice medicine because you don't understand how things actually work... Nonsense. Why does a heart surgeon need to know anything about psychiatry? What does a radiologist need to know about cellular biology? The equivalent for programming would be forcing someone to understand how transistors work at the atomic level, CPU architecture, and OS structure before letting them write a webapp. It's definitely one of the problems in medicine. There's way too much useless knowledge required leading to a limited supply of people being able and willing to master it. Plus, it makes it much more expensive and time consuming to train all of those people.

riahi 8y ago
As a radiologist, I have to know a lot about cellular biology to understand and predict the imaging manifestations of cellular disease. You can’t just delete the baseline foundational knowledge.
- treis 8y ago
  >As a radiologist, I have to know a lot about cellular biology to understand and predict the imaging manifestations of cellular disease. A given radiologist shouldn't be predicting the imaging manifestation of cellular disease. They should be using their knowledge of how known diseases or conditions appear on scans to diagnose the issue. The people that need to understand things on a deeper level are the ones trying to devise new tests or scans to expand front line radiologists diagnostic abilities.
  - natalyarostova 8y ago
    It's pretty wild you're telling a practicing radiologist how they should be doing their job.
    - treis 8y ago
      One of the problems with letting people in a profession set the requirements for that profession is that they exaggerate them to limit competition and increase their earnings. You end up with things like radiologists saying they need to know cellular biology. It's simply ludicrous on its face. Radiology is a particularly egregious case. If it weren't for legal protection the profession would be dramatically different. It's obviously stupid to spend a bunch of time training them to interpret and diagnosis a bunch of different scans. Basic efficiency would be to train Person A to interpret chest X-Rays, person B to do CT scans, Person C for leg X-rays and have them spend all day doing that one thing. Instead, radiologists spend a decade learning how to interpret a hundred different things and spend 1/100 of their time on each of them.

mycorrhizal 8y ago

You are way overstating the knowledge of most practicing physicians. You are right that most of them learned about these topics at some point, but have quickly forgotten them. I worked with a pediatrician who works in under privileged areas and conducts public health research and she had forgotten the difference between a diploid and a haploid cell (for anyone not bio savvy this is bio 101) yet she still does a fine job treating patients and understands the problems of the communities she works in. Different people have different strengths and collaboration is all about enabling others to use their strengths. You do not need to learn most of the things on your list before you can make a positive contribution to medicine. Your list would exclude most physicians from contributing.

wl 8y ago

Yeah, med school/boards require you to memorize some trivia about some or all of those fields. That doesn't mean such knowledge is clinically useful. By necessity, most of that knowledge will be superficial because there is far too much to cover. The stuff that's useful will be retained, while the rest disappears.