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You trust your own engineering opinion over that of an expert professional engineer? The doofus who used to own my house was one of those kinds of people and I

• deleted 13y ago
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• pmorici 13y ago
  You're missing the point. There are a lot of engineers out there who claim to be "expert professionals" and may even have the credentials on paper but when it comes down too it aren't competent. This is evidenced by the large number of posts on HN dedicated to finding and hiring good engineers. People seem to assume that all doctors are roughly equal, or at least meet some baseline level of competency. I'm saying based on my experience in the engineering world and my first hand experience with doctors I don't believe that. So I'm saying that just taking someones word for it because they are a doctor is naive. I've lost track of the number of times I've been told totally nonsensical things by doctors that were just not sound advice which I confirmed by seeking another doctor's opinion and in some cases because what they told me to do made me sicker.
  • nathan_long 13y ago
    I'm sorry you've had bad experiences, and I'm sure you're very smart. But do consider: imagine you're building software for a doctor and he/she disagrees with your choice of database/programming language. You might not say it, but you'd probably think, "really? You probably don't know a function from a hole in the ground." Personally, I can't tell you what all of my organs do, much less what can go wrong with them, much less how that should be treated. I'm sure there are incompetent doctors, but I doubt there are many less competent at medicine than I am.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    Yes, when a single doctor tells you something it is worthwhile seeking more advice and more information. Nasking "whT happens if we jist watch and wait?" Is also a great question to ask. Luckily this isn't relevant to vaccinations because we're not relying on what one person says, but on an accumulated body of research.