I think you need to make a distinction between General practitioners/Personal Care Physicians and Specialists. If I was paying $800 for an annual physical I would be pissed off as well. Not sure why you are paying so much - for reference I pay $30 for this.

From recent experience working with Specialists they are not full of ****. Maybe I was lucky to get some of the best, but the ones I worked with were very talented and I probably wouldn't sitting here if they didn't exist.

I thought everyone knew all this stuff already?

The reason why most people go to the doctor is because they are paranoid/drug addicts (or some combination)

Also most people are too stupid or incompetent to do all the self help things you describe.

I agree with Hawk above...

Dids, wrt Mythbusters, a lot of times they don't need a lot of statistical proof. Their only goal is 'could this myth have occured?' Like, could the wind resistance from a giant truck have REALLY blown a car off the road? If they can get it to happen once in a controlled setting, then the myth is plausible (it could have happened).

I actually saw a study that said flossing might be of no use too. The researcher kinda slammed the ADA and dentists for using common-sense reasoning over rigorous analysis.

On one hand, I'm with you completely. Remember my post last year, Rant: The Medical Profession, when I had diagnosed Iritis twice when specialists failed to do so?

On the other hand, Oma would certainly not be alive today if not for the care of many skilled professionals. (Coma - It's Not Like in the Movies.)

I always come back to the fact that you have to be proactive and inform yourself as well as possible. I've spent hours and hours reading up on medical issues we're dealing with, like brain injury.

I had surgery two weeks ago today. After reading web forums with others who had the same procedure, I thought recovery was going to be a bitch. But, I tried to do my research and find the best surgeon in the field. It's paid off in spades. I'm much better off than I anticipated at this point and will probably return to work three weeks sooner than expected.

I give my surgeon a ton of credit. Second opinions FTW.

Why don't you just do this then? Sounds like you are saying "I can basically do just as good a job as a doctor, but I keep going to doctors anyway, isn't this really stupid?"

I don't go to a doctor unless there's something really badly wrong. I do think that people shouldn't be allowed prescribe themselves whatever drugs they want, because people are just too stupid, so there is some need for a medical professional there. And not everyone wants to deliver their own baby, so they have the option of getting nurses and doctors to do it for them. But there are very few situations where you are "forced" to go to a doctor when you could fix it yourself.

That's a fair assessment, and I agree. It's more of a reflection on our society in general rather than just doctors.

How did you figure out you needed to go to the doctor?

Well, of course. Specialists are a different matter entirely, but not completely immune from being *******s with a superiority complex.

For example: I know more about the anatomy of the shoulder and elbow from a biomechanical standpoint than any doctor who hasn't studied it for the specific purpose of how ballistic activities affect those areas. This is not arrogance; I simply have read nearly all the relevant journal articles (and I do mean that - I have read over 50 published peer-review studies), advanced textbooks recommended for final-year med students specializing in kinesiology, had in-depth conversations with physicians and surgeons, etc, etc. For all intents and purposes, I am an expert when it comes to throwing a baseball and what it will do to your arm.

Now, if I watch high-speed video of a pitcher who complains of soreness after a certain subset of conditions given his nutrition and exercise background, I can't take him to a surgeon or specialist and tell him the most likely cause of his pain. They're going to tell me that I'm not qualified to make that judgment, when the reality is almost certainly going to be that they have no ****ing clue what causes baseball-related injuries (UCL replacement, SLAP tears, etc) - they just know how to fix them.

That type of superiority complex really gets my goat.

Nope. I have subscriptions to multiple journals that discuss exercise physiology and kinesiology that covers all types of peer-reviewed literature and cases involving specific sets of injuries. Every major surgery and breakthrough in medical technology is available for the layperson with Internet access for a small fee. Hell, most doctors admit to not reading these journals simply because there's too many of them or they're too arrogant to do so. I actually do go through them and educate myself to what's happening in today's world.

Why the hell couldn't my doctor tell me what was wrong with my shoulder in college when I had pain? I saw a "specialist" who told me to stop throwing so many baseballs. Oh, well that's ****ing great, it's not like I'm a pitcher or anything, now is it? When I pressed him for answers on how joint loads and forces on my arm would specifically affect my connective tissue, he shrugged and said "It's commonly accepted that overuse is the main reason for these types of shoulder and elbow injuries."

Well **** you, that's not good enough, because anyone with a college education in biology will tell you that's a load of bull****. It turns out that he was telling the truth; doctors had no real idea how these injuries happened and no one really bothered to figure out why.

Now, I don't purport to know exactly why these injuries happen, but using high-speed film, accelerometers, and statistical analysis of pitchers, we can make some pretty good educated guesses. Nearly all of the advances in this area have come from laypeople like myself, yet another nail in the coffin of the elite few who spend four years slaving over textbooks and memorizing horse**** that may or may not be true.

The ****ing value of doctors is to prescribe someone a second-rate diet that has been disproven by amateur nutritionists? Well that's just great. Google and T-Nation could have told the fat **** how to eat and exercise for the cost of $0.

Yeah, god forbid he tell the truth, or worse yet, actually educate himself!

her name was Oma and she was in a coma?



This summer when my mom questioned my dad's primary care physician about not doing enough when my dad wasn't feeling well, the doctor told her "not to be such a worrier." He was dead within a month.

I think hating on Mythbusters is the wrong way to go here. It captures the core principles of scientific inquiry better than anything else I can think of off the top of my head in popular entertainment. Does it constitute proof of anything? Of course not, but it's a great way of testing plausibility.

I do tend to think that there are some problems with doctors. (Digression: my own perspective is that med school seems like a ridiculous barrier to entry, and that we'd all probably be better off if we moved to something more explicitly like an apprentice system. Residency does some of this for you, but why not just make the apprenticeship 3 years longer or something? This isn't a fully fleshed out idea but I think there's something to it.) That said, part of the problem is that even if you do take a very scientific approach the human body is just a grotesquely complicated system. There are tons and tons of variables that somebody putting together a study is going to have relatively little control over, and the length of time that many studies are going to require is immense. In terms of diagnosis, there are obviously lots of tests and techniques that can give us further insight, but these are generally really expensive, and so trying to get away without using them except when necessary is a key part of economizing. Difficulties with the scientific approach doesn't mean that you should give up and refuse to question processes, but it does explain why there's so much frustrating vagueness.

Of course I do that, but the point is that it's illegal for me to prescribe myself medication. You say you're against this because people are stupid. Why? So what if people are stupid? Why is it your job to save them from being dumb?

There is nothing wrong with doctors and nurses being available, but for the law to tell me that I must go see these special people with licenses granted by the all mighty government to do simple **** like prescribe myself painkillers is ******ed.

No one who swallows 600mg of Oxycontin is unaware that it is bad for them. They aren't that dumb. As such, why police them?

Sure, I agree. However, why does all the research have to be done by medical students and other people who are "elite" enough as chosen by the government, academia, or the medical profession itself?

With the notable exception (at least with the few eps I watch, and I may have been high) of multiple trials.

I believe the ep I saw was one on drunk driving, which was amusing, and that was probably the intent, but didn't prove ****.

More than anything specific with Mythbusters- my overall point was that once you understand statistics and scientific method, you realize that there is a lot of FOS reasoning afoot in general.

Oma is German for "grandma".

If you ignore the failed-attempt-at-funny panels and focus on the 1st, 3rd, and 4th panels, you'll see a very good point.

People hate on Freaknomics sometimes because some of the stuff he says is questionable/more nuanced than the book goes into, but for Christ's sake, in 1989 more people believed in ESP than did in evolution.

meh self help is nice and all but the aforementioned headache that turns out to be a brain tumor is the argument against that.

especially if you hurt yourself in a way you never have before, you have a greater chance of misdiagnosing it than a doctor, webmd or no. with some things it's easy to know how ****ed up the situation is, with others it isn't. there's always the possibility that you have something similar, but much worse, that's gonna **** you up for good if you don't treat it correctly.

that said, and i've mentioned this before, i do believe esp. US doctors are too med-happy. financial kickbacks for doctors are a bad, bad thing imo. as in the people who allow that deserve to be assraped and shot in the stomach bad. the ads on tv for 'ask your doctor about x' are similarly torture-worthy. it's one thing to entice someone into buying a TV he doesn't need, but meds are prescription-only for a reason, and making people want them more than they should is criminal imo.


also a quick read over this post has convinced me why capitals are a good thing. my next post will be more legible i promise.

I have had discussions with MD's that have strong math backgrounds that see no incompatibility with evolution and intelligent design. The point of incompatibility lies in the difference between literal creation and intelligent design.

Sounds like someone needs a purge of the choleric humour.

Yeah. I love Mythbusters - the people behind it are not idiots, and they have said routinely that they would love to do controlled trials and thousands of repeats, but guess what? That **** doesn't sell on TV.

The XKCD comic perfectly illustrates that if you hold your beliefs up to simple experiments to test the validity of your argument, you'll do plenty to educate yourself. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to accept that everything you know about a subject cannot be backed up with logic, which explains a lot.

This argument is such BS. I have a terrible headache, so I take some Ibuprofen (1000mg of it because the industry standard of 200mg is ******ed), drink plenty of Gatorade, and sleep.

A few days later, I still have this absurd headache and it is not going away. Worse yet, it is affecting my vision. I go to the doctor, get a CT scan, and I have a tumor. ****balls!

It's not like I would sit around with a pounding headache for weeks on end and go "Ah **** it, it's probably nothing."

When the first response to basic problems is "OMG go to the doctor" (and yes, this includes broken bones), there's no wonder why we have a financial/medical crisis on our hands.

Politardization:

If Thomas Gilovich's How We Know What Isn't So was required reading in high school




To elaborate on Kyle's point, how many diseases are there that are
A) Very dangerous
B) Cause limited symptoms that are easily diagnosed as the serious problem
C) Curable if caught early, not curable if caught late

Like if I have a really painful headache, the idea that it's cancer is like 8 trillionth on the concern list, so I'm going to try a whole lot of other **** before getting an MRI. But the same is true if I go to a doctor, MRIs are very expensive.


I guess something like diabetes might qualify, the symptoms for undiagnosed/untreated type 2 diabetes are really vague. It's like fatigue, ennui, and/or necrosis of extremities. Thanks a lot, Wikipedia.

People misusing antibiotics hurts everyone, not just them. Not that the system we have in place prevents that completely, obviously, but it's better than having Cipro available over-the-counter at Rite-Aid.

That's an argument for restricting antibiotics, there's lots of drugs that aren't like this though.

Yeah, this stopped doctors from overprescribing penicillin and amoxicillin in the 1970's through the 1990's. Oh wait, it didn't.

a few weeks ago i starting getting horrible, sharp pains in the left side of my chest whenever i took a breath, i couldn't sleep because the pain was worse when i laid down so i starting looking around on the internet and came to the conclusion that i most likely had pleurisy (inflammation of the membrane surrounding the lungs) or a collapsed lung.

finally went into urgent care one night, doctor did some weird listening tests on my chest and i got an x-ray, the x-ray showed i had quite a bit of pleurae inflammation, he gave me painkillers, some anti-inflammatory stuff and now its pretty much gone. obviously i could have obtained some painkillers illegally, popped a bunch of ibuprofen and the outcome would have been the same but there was no way for me to positively identify what exactly was wrong with me. if it had been a collapsed lung and i did nothing i would have been ****ed.

i agree that there are some horrible physicians and quite a few problems with the whole medical system but people who believe they can diagnose all their problems using the internet, think doctors are worthless and only good for prescribing meds are ridiculous.

Jesus Christ, that's horrible. That is just... wow.