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Comment by odyssey7 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this explanation is intentionally simplified, but what it’s telling me is that medical science is just lost.

The problem is that, despite medical science making advances abound, doctoring as a profession changes exceptionally slowly, and most doctors (especially male doctors IME) take an adversarial approach to patients who have questions.

I have a relatively common autoimmune disease. I have had much better experiences with NPs than doctors in explaining that certain medications are contraindicated for people with my disease.

Ego has always been a massive issue in medicine. I wonder if this is exclusive to the US, or if we see it everywhere.

You need to have a big ego to take on the responsibility of a doctor. A lot of people can’t handle it emotionally so the job selects for people with narcissism or psychopathy. This is a very rough generalization but from my interactions with surgeons it fits pretty well.

Judging pain is philosophy more than science.

How do we know what is in someone else's head?

We will soon enough know what's going on in people's heads. While it may help us better understand pain, it will probably cause all kinds of other unforeseen consequences.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The brain is incredibly complicated, and frankly we are still very far from understanding much about how it works.

But this doesn’t mean we aren’t making incredible advancements. Discoveries are constantly being made in the background and are continuing to build up over time.

For example, a non-addictive pain medication was just approved by the FDA [0]. This will undoubtedly improve millions of lives and prevent uncountable numbers of people from misusing opiates in the future.

[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...

But it's listed for acute pain, don't opiates already work well for that use-case? My understanding is that the time-limited nature of them and lack of continued access makes dependence unlikely and that the holy grail is a solution for chronic pain.

The lack of continued access leads a lot of people into fentanyl and other drugs.

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