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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

Engineers have a peculiar relationship with doctors. When they have need of one, and the doctor decides on a treatment plan for them, they think about the complexity of the problem space the doctor had to navigate to reach that decision. They wish the doctor would chart the parameter space for them, so they can agree or disagree with the choice in an informed manner, and have more of a clue about the competence of the doctor. This is usually not what happens, not to their satisfaction anyway, and it's deeply unsettling having to trust rather than know when it comes to something that appears so much like engineering on the surface.

An alternative title for this article might be "what doctors really think", and thus strikes to the heart of this issue.

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I had a doctor back in my home country who was fascinating. He would give me hard facts about everything and he would explain all the reasoning behind his recommendations with numbers, probabilities, etc., putting everything down on paper. I loved being treated by that guy. I wish every doctor were like this.

Here in the US I've only so far had the tipical experience of:

1) Telling my symptoms. 2) Observing that half of what I'm saying is being ignored - this pisses me off because I'm very obsessive about my health, so any interested doctor can hear me give them extremely accurate descriptions of what I'm feeling, and how those things relate to daily activities, eating habits, exercise, other symptoms and a number of other things. 3) Being diagnosed with something I'm very sure I don't have (and I'm right most of the time). It's usually something super generic, like "upper respiratory infection".

Or, as a (former) doctor, I love telling my engineer friends:

Intuition can't be formalized.

Part of the reason simply being the "system level" thinking that has to be developed, practiced and honed by any doctor worth his/her salt. And when you think of it, even with our current understanding of the human organism and the phenomenon called life, we are primarily working using 'heuristics', barely glimpsing the ultra-complex jigsaw that makes everything tick. Someday, when the ken of this knowledge is complete, we may be able to formalize the logic, albeit, the 'computer' it runs on, may well be as complex as our own brains!

Want to bet? I'll bet that in 20 years we will have programs that can diagnose a patient and explain how it came to its conclusions.

I'm saving that paragraph. That was a fantastic explaination.

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