Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I share your concerns with the US medical system. It is a bunch of busy, reasonably bright people caught up in an insane circus. It on average produces adequate care, but you shouldn't expect much more. Having an active and informed advocate can make an enormous difference.

On the other hand, I agree that more data isn't necessarily better. There are plenty of examples. E.g.:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/prostate-cancer-tes...

If you do early prostate screening, you get worse medical outcomes than when you don't screen. Or consider whole-body scans:

http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/news/newdetarget.cfm?ID=5

They will detect a lot of stuff that doesn't matter, but proving that it doesn't matter will be expensive and possibly harmful.

You see a similar phenomenon in investing. As Fooled by Randomness explains well, for most people the best strategy is to set your investments and look at them very rarely. If you watch the investment news all day and trade actively, you may not do better, you could easily do worse, and you'll certainly be much more stressed. But still, there is an endless supply of day-traders.

Brazilian here (and surprised to see they used Brazilian research software in a top HN story!). Couple years ago, my wife had a mass on her throat that turned out to be thyroid-related but (thankfully) benign.

I had the EXACT same feeling as you, and feel we're copying the US in only the wrong aspects. "A bunch of busy, reasonably bright people caught up in an insane circus" sums it up better than I could. I'll digress here and vent about another aspect of it, but I liked your links about too much data, thanks.

Not sure how it is in the US, but what is strange for me here is that it's not only about cutting-edge tech, even old stuff (Email? Messaging of any kind? Hell, phone calls!) is not really used by our hospitals and doctors.

Here, if you do any type of imaging exams, y'll have to wait a few days for the results, get them on the lab - physically -, schedule another doctor appointment, wait an hour or so in the waiting room just so your doctor can take a look at the images and tell you, basically: "Ok, you're fine", or "Hmm, I need these other exams to be sure. Here, take this piece of paper where I describe what I need and get it done".

Seriously, we use instant messages delivered to phones all around the world simultaneously to share pictures of ourselves, of our cats, dogs and dinners, just for a giggle. And we can't do it to save lives!

You probably don't want sensitive medical information in unsafe messaging systems.

Yeah, I thought about that too, but I'm pretty sure that there are lots of cases where you don't care.

In our case, I know we would both EASILY take that trade off. Sending her imaging exams via, well, whatever really, on the same day, and get SOME answer. Instead of waiting anxiously for days and then hours at a hospital waiting room, stressed out and missing work.

Yeah, I'd take that any day for most things.

My wife is Brazilian and she actually prefers that way of getting lab results (get it yourself) to the American way: Results are sent directly to the doctor, to encourage you to schedule and pay for another doctor's visit to have the results read to you by a nurse.

In her opinion it was a violation of patient rights when we were unable to retrieve some lab results directly from the lab. In order to do that we would have to file some paperwork with the lab company and get the results mailed to us in 3-4 weeks.

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