12 ms·

I'm sorry, but what? You're telling me you're an engineer, and your very first reaction to this was not to immediately call an ambulance?

• jlgreco 14y ago
  Some engineers can have a (dangerous) tendency to want to either fix themselves or diagnose themselves.
• robomartin 14y ago
  Well, there's the part about not being able to see and hear. I was exhausted and most-definitely not thinking straight. I pretty much collapsed into bed and probably slept ten hours. I woke up feeling just fine and just in time to present my paper. I was younger and definitely stupider. No, I didn't go to the doctor. Dumb. Lived to tell about.
• nitrogen 14y ago
  Some engineers may have been raised in an environment of distrust of doctors, or of scorn upon those who call the doctor for anything less than a confirmed broken bone or heart attack. Edit: for such people, it would be useful if schools taught what sorts of issues are doctor worthy, and which should be ignored or dealt with by over-the-counter remedies.
  • heretohelp 14y ago
    >Some engineers may have been raised in an environment of distrust of doctors, or of scorn upon those who call the doctor for anything less than a confirmed broken bone or heart attack. Are you me?
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      Are you me? It's doubtful ;). One of my parents was a coach when I was young, always complaining about hypochondriac players who were "faking" their injuries just to avoid playing. This same parent still refuses to get treatment for an easily treatable ailment after years of low-level pain and annoyance. As a result, I have an instinct to avoid doctors, and don't really know what requires a doctor and what doesn't. Despite my conscious awareness of this, I still have difficulty overriding the instinct.
      • heretohelp 14y ago
        I have an over-literate under-educated mother who has a home-spun German cure for everything and a grumpy mechanical engineer for a father... ...and I'm a programmer. My parents never took me to the hospital/doctor for anything. This caused problems a couple times, but I was fortunate enough to be an otherwise healthy individual. Pretty strong internal distrust of doctors still, partly because most doctors I've encountered don't seem to understand how to map statistics onto their mental pattern-matchers. I go to a doctor if it might lead to something permanent, otherwise I wait it out.
        • illuminate 14y ago
          "I was fortunate enough to be an otherwise healthy individual." Which is exactly why you think medicine is so close to quackery. You have no need for modern medicine as of right now, it's easy to take it for granted.
  • delinka 14y ago
    I live in an environment where I find it appalling that I need to pay $150 to wait an hour to see the doctor who studies me for thirty seconds and gives me a high-price prescription for a double dose of what I can get over the counter. It's not so much "trust" as it is "should it seriously cost this much?" I personally had a strange episode a few years ago where I just ... felt really awful. But I was lucid the entire time. Wife checked my blood sugar (not a diabetic, but she having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes years ago we have the equipment around) and it was scarily low. Kept hydrated, got some smal bits of food in me, felt better, slept the night with no problems. Called the doctor the next day, they had no interest in seeing me immediately - so they gave me an appointment a few days later. Did some blood work and ... he had no idea what was up. It's never happened again. If I'd gone to the hospital, I'd probably gotten a glucose drip and sent home with a $1,000 bill. So I tend to keep my cool, self-diagnose, watch my kids closely when they're complaining of problems, get medical help when it's necessary. At $150 a visit, I can fix my own sniffles - I'll call the doc when it's doesn't clear up after a few weeks.
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      Yes, there is that factor, too. It's especially an issue when you're striving to be ramen profitable in a bootstrapped company. $150 buys a lot of ramen.
    • heretohelp 14y ago
      I've had similar experiences, one of them even involved low blood sugar like you. I didn't have to test though, had a parent with periods of low blood sugar so I just ate some food and observed myself suddenly feeling drastically better. I don't think we're that far past doctors just being quacks throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall. They don't seem to be able to, in any given single case, observe/detect/test for much unless there's an associated infection or physical injury.
      • jlgreco 14y ago
        As primitive as modern medicine still really is, I think it is important to remember that it is not like engineers with no medical training are actually going to do any better. Yes, you figured out that you had low blood sugar. Doctors would have as well. If that weren't the case, we'd sack all the doctors and hire engineers to fill the hospitals instead. Put it this way: your average highschool geek can program a little. If they put their back into it, it is not unheard of for them to engineer solutions to whatever it is that they are trying to achieve (they are after all rather bright.) On particularly rare occasions, the untrained highschooler can teach himself enough to rival seasoned software developers in a very narrow segment of the field, but will quickly be out of his depth again if the situation changes. I would say the gap between highschool geek and seasoned software developer is somewhat comparable to the gap between engineer and medical doctor (if anything, the comparison gives doctors too little credit.) The difference really is that you are playing with your own health, not some relatively speaking inconsequential software. (This all said, the cost problem is of course very real.)
  • abecedarius 14y ago
    If you don't trust doctors, why would you trust schools? Admittedly in each case you'd hopefully see their claims as input worth considering.
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      I don't mean "trust" in the sense of "willingness to incorporate input into one's rational model of the world," but rather in the sense of "deep-seated instinctive aversion that is difficult to change." One can consciously consider the word of a doctor as highly valuable input, while simultaneously having a visceral distrust of the abstract concept of doctors that is beyond their immediate control. It does not follow that this instinctively learned distrust must necessarily extend to schools, though perhaps if a particular person's distrust of doctors originates in a general distaste for authority, it is possible.
      • abecedarius 14y ago
        I do expect it to come down to distrust of authority, but maybe that's too optimistic.