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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

None of the people quit medicine. They just chose to have a greater impact by not seeing patients.

Doctors who see patients are effectively professional laborers. Their impact is limited primarily to the patients they see.

Doctors who step off the patient treadmill can contribute to health in ways that affect more people than they could if they were just seeing individuals.

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IMHO, a trained professional who can effectively diagnose and treat someone's medical condition, from something serious like cancer to minor like skin rash made a bigger difference in that person's life than someone who improved seconds off that person's "e-commerce checkout funnel" or delivered more "personal targeted ads" or even more improved "electronic medical patient records retrieval and storage" for that matter.

What about the person(s) who invented the Page rank algorithm?

You should measure this statistically in terms of lives impacted. For instance, a service matching patients to clinical trials could have a massive impact. Ad tech that connects donors to allow free delivery of clean water. It's a false dichotomy to say such work is not impactful.

Good, intuitive portable emergency records would save millions of lives. Checklists (as pioneered by airlines) save lives in medicine. Is a good collaborative checklist technology not up to this standard?

This just confirms for me that the world needs more respect for laborers.

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