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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

A doctor's opinion on disease isn't merely an opinion, it's an educated guess based on experience and qualifications. New diseases and research are constantly appearing, thousands of articles are written each year. We can't expect doctors to know everything, but we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, than non-doctors.

I say this because there's a rising trend of anti-intellectualism and distrust of doctors in the US, which leads to massive self inflicted wounds in Covid and vaccines. Doctors aren't infallible, but they're far better than random online sources.

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trend of anti-intellectualism and distrust of doctors

As someone who knows a practicing doctor who is also anti-vax, these are orthogonal issues. Sometimes, distrusting a specific doctor is the more intellectual approach.

You'd be surprised how many physicians and nurses refuse vaccination. You'll just never hear about it. AMA is one powerful beast, I wish I had a union like that.

However, sometimes fun little things like this happen that show their true colors:

"Starting in early 2003, the United States government started a program to vaccinate 500,000 volunteer health care professionals throughout the country. Recipients were healthcare workers who would be first-line responders in the event of a bioterrorist attack. Many healthcare workers refused, worried about vaccine side effects, and healthcare systems refused to participate. Fewer than 40,000 actually received the vaccine.[29]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

over 90% refused.

That doesn't mean distrust of vaccination in general - at least by doctors. It was for a potential bioterrorist attack. It perhaps more reflects the low likelihood or belief that there would be a small pox attack.

Meanwhile, 96% of physicians are vaccinated against COVID - https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...

If you assume the low likelyhood of the attack was the reason, that means 90% of those physicians could be lying. The stated reason for refusal was concerns about side effects. It's in the quote.

What you stated as a fact, 96% vaccination rate, is actually a self-reported survey.

Why do a survey when public health CDC records could simply be matched with the physician licensing registrars?

Seems an automatic search like that would save physicians their valuable time, aren't they very busy with a pandemic right now? Instead of hard data from CDC, we get self-reported, likely anonymous, self-reported survey.

What do they have to hide?

It's always cost-benefit. Relative risk of side effect directly relates to likelihood.

Risk of side effects vs benefit of vaccine.

I am not likely to take an HIV vaccine, since my personal chance of contracting HIV is incredibly low. So any side effect isn't "worth it" -- even a sore arm. But that doesn't mean I'm anti-vaccine.

I also don't wear a bullet proof vest around because it's too heavy ("side effect"). Does that mean I'm anti-bullet proof vest? No. But I would wear a bullet proof vest in a war zone -- even if it's heavy.

If there was a widespread small pox outbreak in the U.S., I'm certain more than 10% of physicians would take the vaccine. Does that mean they were lying before? No.

did you read my comment?

covid 96% status is from an anonymous survey.

Why not just get CDC to provide actual hard data? Surely they keep vaccination records?

Should vaccination status of physician, as verified by the CDC, be public data?

Because even if I did point to official stats, you would say they are just lying?

A few months prior to the AMA survey, Long Term Care Facilities reported a 75% vaccination rate amongst physicians at their facilities. So presumably higher now.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7030a2.htm

The stated reason for refusal was concerns about side effects.

As another comment already mentioned, smallpox vaccines (at least historically) tended to have undesirable side effects, like permanent scars. Smallpox vaccination is probably not a good proxy for vaccination overall. It's not worth getting vaccinated for smallpox unless you expect a decent risk of exposure.

What do they have to hide?

Privacy should be the default.

they have a monopoly license, these things come with strings.

Do you want to go to anti-vaxx doctor?

The smallpox vaccine has a non-trivial amount of danger and the only smallpox in the world is guarded very closely.

I'd qualify that: "...we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, _for any random condition_, than non-doctors."

The thing I think you're missing is that the resources to do good, deep research on a condition do exist, and the sufferer has very strong motivation to do that research and become very well informed in the etiology and treatment options. The doctor, less so. They have a lot of patients and a lot of demands on their time.

Will a good doctor put in the effort, do the research, and come up with a superior treatment plan? Certainly! But not all doctors will do this.

If you use the allegory of the pig and the chicken, the sufferer is the pig, the doctor is the chicken. It is reasonable that the average pig will put in more work and be better informed about their own condition than the average chicken.

For anyone else who isn't familiar with the Pig and Chicken story:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

The English language has a serious deficiency in the term "research".

You can do "research" by spending your days in a lab, formulating hypotheses, doing experiments, reading related academic work, drawing conclusions, publishing their findings.

You can do "research" by googling, reading blog posts and wikipedia articles, watching Youtube videos, following telegram links and possibly reading a popular-science book.

These two things are very different activities and produce very different bodies of knowledge. "Do your own research!" is a common sentiment in Covid skeptic circles. It doesn't mean being in a lab. It means following links in your Google bubble. That doesn't necessarily produce useful knowledge. Properly trained researchers are aware of things like confirmation bias, selection bias, recollection bias. The "I did my own research crowd" is not and suffers seriously from it.

Using the term with the doctor is blurring the line between both versions. They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", but they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

> they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

Pompous credentialism.

This is a hacker forum. Are people outside of universities unable to learn computer science, applied math, sw dev? Sure, biomed is a different field, but that’s all it is. A different knowledge base, there are more and more biomed hackers out there too, not to mention quite a few patients are PhDs and MDs themselves.

Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Nice set of preconceived notions and biases there, fellow researcher.

> Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Wow, it's hard to misconstrue my post more than that. Impressive!

Of course there are patients with more clue than the average patient. And of course there are incompetent doctors. But the common doctor is more educated in the medical field than the common patient.

Don't believe that? Next time you have surgery, just demand that instead of the surgeon, the next patient in the waiting room does the surgery on you. That's roughly what you are babbling about. Nothing they couldn't learn with a bit of youtube, eh?

> despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

The post you replied to literally contains the words 'They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", '

Indeed, there is plenty of distrust. If they are doing such a great job though, why the distrust?

I don't know a single person with a significant chronic condition in the US who would say the health system and all their physicians are amazing and great. Usually you hear the exact opposite.

However, stories about that gem of a doctor they finally found over the years are very common. Most physician suck, not sure why.

Loss of trust is indeed very unfortunate, counterproductive and indeed leads to unnecessary suffering.

Physicians are highly educated professionals in a legally protected rent-seeking monopoly, backed by a powerful trade union, AMA, and the corresponding social status/wealth/authority that comes with all that. Seems to me it's only fair that the onus is entirely on them to win that trust back. I'm not holding my breath though.

Medicine is just another business. Remember that next time you see a doctor.

> I don't know a single person with a significant chronic condition in the US who would say the health system and all their physicians are amazing and great. Usually you hear the exact opposite.

> However, stories about that gem of a doctor they finally found over the years are very common. Most physician suck, not sure why.

Great example of reporting bias. Nobody goes around telling everybody "all is fine". That's not news and nobody wants to hear it. Something needs to be special, out of the ordinary, a sensation even. "All my doctors suck, listen to my 10-minute rant about my odyssey" is what people _think_ will be interesting.

Ever heard a news anchor say "Nothing remarkable happened today. Have a good evening." Of course not. They will report something, no matter how unimportant, ridiculous, sensationalist.

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