What percent of your brain do you use while shopping?

[PRR]

> What we need is some way to accumulate all the practicing doctors experience into a single database or expert system, decision making engine.

Groopman is strongly opposed to the "systems" available (7 years ago). Of course a "Watson" type system may be steered by a small earnest group, and a Major Medical system WILL be steered by multiple committees each diluting the IQ of the committee before.

And then there is the TV show "Mystery Diagnosis"(?). The main character sees many doctors for 3 months to 30 years (22 minutes show-time) before finding the doctor with a diagnosis that makes sense. "But they are left wondering why it took so long...". Often it turns out there have only been 6 cases in the whole world. While an Expert System may have that disorder somewhere in its banks, the low probability means it may never bubble-up with the certainty that medical administrators "need" to authorize tests/treatments.

> Fixing amps does not strike me as much like doctoring. Amp circuitry is defined by simpler rules and less variables...

Yes. But we techs can be fogged or blinded by the same human factors as doctors, whatever the complexity of the machine on the table.

 

[PRR]

> I don't believe in doctoring my coffee with any non-coffee substances.

For medicinal purpose only!! Feed a cold. Sugar is a fine strong drug (even if most of us are over-acclimated to it).

> Claritin .... it didn't do squat.

It is different from Chlor-Trim, with 20 minute kick and 4 hour fade. Loratadine takes a couple days to build and more days to fade. Between trees, grass, weeds, and dust, I was doing 2-4 Chlors a day 280+ days a year. With loratadine I just do one a day "whether I need it or not" (because I usually do), for about 10-1/2 months a year (take February off).

But I agree that everybody is different. And certainly loratadine is inappropriate for occasional allergy.

 

[JohnRoberts]

> What we need is some way to accumulate all the practicing doctors experience into a single database or expert system, decision making engine.

Groopman is strongly opposed to the "systems" available (7 years ago). Of course a "Watson" type system may be steered by a small earnest group, and a Major Medical system WILL be steered by multiple committees each diluting the IQ of the committee before.

I don't know what Groopman thinks while I did read a synopsis with some good observations.

Funny about committees diluting the IQ of operation.  My suggestion for expert systems is to reduce the human errors, while computers may lack the non-linear leaps that human brains can make, so much of practicing medicine is fairly rote associating symptoms with a singular cause.   

And then there is the TV show "Mystery Diagnosis"(?). The main character sees many doctors for 3 months to 30 years (22 minutes show-time) before finding the doctor with a diagnosis that makes sense. "But they are left wondering why it took so long...". Often it turns out there have only been 6 cases in the whole world. While an Expert System may have that disorder somewhere in its banks, the low probability means it may never bubble-up with the certainty that medical administrators "need" to authorize tests/treatments.

I love the doc shows, probably going back to Marcus Welby MD, where they always manage to come up with a cure in less than an hour including commercials. Some of the new doc shows look a cross between Welby and Mcguyver.

I am optimistic that we are getting smarter about understanding the way we human's vary from each other based on genetic variance. There was one medical company that developed a blood test that predicts risk of sundry  disease vectors based on genome and the government made them stop selling test results to consumers fearful that they would take measures based on the test results that were too extreme. If course there is no reason our practicing doctors can not use this technology to do a better job.

Richer input information from new tests, infallible silicon memory, and smarter than the average bear number crunching should be able to help a profession that appears little changed from how it was done a hundred years ago. We have better diagnostic tools, and more treatment medicines, but managing the body of knowledge still leaves something to be desired IMO. 

> Fixing amps does not strike me as much like doctoring. Amp circuitry is defined by simpler rules and less variables...

Yes. But we techs can be fogged or blinded by the same human factors as doctors, whatever the complexity of the machine on the table.

Yes but imagine the fog of human problem solving dealing with an order of magnitude more variables when trying to repair broken humans.  The good news is humans often repair themselves. Something I've never seen a fried amp do.

JR