from Hacker News

“Imagine If Doctors Relied on Google as Much as Programmers Do”

by xojoc on 12/17/21, 6:58 AM with 80 comments

• by MarcScott on 12/17/21, 8:51 AM

  My father was a GP, which obviously meant he didn't just see patients with symptoms related to a specific specialism he had studied intensely. He saw patients with a broad variety of symptoms that needed a diagnosis to decide if he could just administer treatment himself, or might require a referral to a consultant.

  He was an excellent diagnostician, but when he was unsure or stumped by a set of symptoms he would outright just use Google. All the partners at the practice did. The skill was then sorting the wheat from the chaff in the search results, and then making the correct decisions for treatment.

  Doctors don't just use specialist software to look things up, they often just use Google like the rest of us, it's bloody fast and with personalisation of search results, it often returns answers most relevant to you (or your profession).

• by meheleventyone on 12/17/21, 8:02 AM

  Did the first few commenters not read the article at all? It’s literally about how Doctors look up information all the time. This makes perfect sense because not only is there so much information to remember best practices and other information change all the time.

  In programmers avoiding looking up references is far more an ego driven ascetic approach than it is anything practical. Same with eschewing modern tooling.

• by lordnacho on 12/17/21, 8:40 AM

  There's no knowledge job that doesn't rely on reference material. If a field is a knowledge field, the material cannot be anything but too big and detailed to remember the entirety of.

  What you're hiring when you hire a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or software engineer is judgement. Either X is simple and don't worry about it, or this will have a simple solution and here it is, or this will take more investigation and let me look stuff up, or this is a specialist problem and I know who you need.

  Of course it's often the case that the professional will just give you an answer, because there's certain bread and butter things that everyone asks about. But that shouldn't trick you into thinking they've memorized their whole field, you just haven't asked an interesting question.

• by bborud on 12/17/21, 9:06 AM

  What amazes me about medicine is how incredibly much students have to cram into their heads in a short amount of time, and that they are capable of that. I don't think I could. What is even more amazing is that they still start almost from scratch when faced with the reality of practicing medicine. Because there is still so much to learn and so much to keep up with.

  Fun episode at the doctor's office: was in for a routine checkup. Joked with doctor about patients that google their symptoms and come up with all manner of wild diagnoses. Remember to ask about a minor symptom I'd been experiencing for about a week. Doctor Googles symptom. Eyes meet. She blushes, I almost fall off my chair laughing.

• by arn on 12/17/21, 8:53 AM

  The big resource for doctors (or was back in my day) is UpToDate.com - which includes up-to-date clinical summaries of diseases, treatments, with references to clinical studies that back them.

  It was an indirect inspiration for MacRumors' roundups. Where we summarize the current information on a particular product rumor, so you don't have to keep up with the "literature".

• by hliyan on 12/17/21, 8:26 AM

  Using Google to augment memory is fine for both engineers and doctors. Using it to replace comprehension is acceptable for neither. If a doctor administered insulin to a diabetic without any understanding of the pancreas or the body's blood glucose regulation pathways, that would be bad (yes, nurses do that, but under the supervision of a doctor). If a doctor uses a program to calculate the dose, there is nothing wrong with that.

• by chadcmulligan on 12/17/21, 9:45 AM

  I remember going to my doctor years ago - pre google. She dragged out this big book and had a look through it, I forget the name. She said at the time she used to go out the back and have a look through it so patients wouldn't see her, but stopped worrying about it.

• by nly on 12/17/21, 9:02 AM

  I'd rather have a doctor looking things up than one that thinks they can remember everything from school/training.

• by scyzoryk_xyz on 12/17/21, 9:51 AM

  I work with surgeons on a product for skill development and lately I’ve had the opportunity to go to a few conferences that specialized in endoscopic surgery.

  There is a lot work being done on augmenting the surgeon - solving the problem of access to information at the right time in the right place would dramatically improve work in that field.

  Currently, if you’re making a decision in the OR, all you have is your knowledge/experience, and maybe when/if you’re lucky, of the other surgeon/s who happens to be physically available to consult the situation. This is something I witnessed personally when visiting an OR - a surgeon ran in from another OR to get a quick consult on an unfamiliar situation.

  There are a few products and ideas I’ve seen for headsets which allow others outside of the room to have tele-presence.

  It’s not hard to imagine how much having an instantly searchable and accessible global knowledge base for an operator would be. The newest methodologies, know-how, research, reference media etc.

• by mindcrime on 12/17/21, 9:16 AM

  I don't know how much the average doctor uses Google, but here's an anecdote that may be slightly relevant. I was visiting my GP for something or other a couple of years ago, and we were sitting in his office going over some stuff about some medicines and stuff, and he turns to his computer, Googles something, winds up on a Wikipedia page (in addition to some other pages), and after a minute or two turns back to me and goes "OK, yeah, so you should be taking <blah, blah, whatever>".

  And this guy wasn't some fly-by-night quack either... he was a very experienced and highly regarded local doctor who had been in his practice a long time.

  So yeah, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that doctors don't Google for the specifics on occasion just like we do.

• by animal531 on 12/17/21, 10:30 AM

  I find that as the scope of information grows that meta-information becomes far more important. I don't need to know how to solve a problem, but I need to know the terminology for how to get to information about it.

  Sometimes you can only guess at the meta though, for example I'm building an RTS type game at the moment and I needed to figure out how to get units to move together and pack around the destination point. Even though the scene is 3d they are only moving on a 2d plane, so I searched for a circle packing algorithm and found usable results.

  Sadly we're not looking for this skill when interviewing, there they'd have asked me to display skill in different algorithms and structures, language questions etc.

• by Borrible on 12/17/21, 9:32 AM

  They don't program humans, they maintain or repair them, help them to cope and soothe them. The system they're working on doesn't change that fast biological, albeit a bit faster social. The main components are millions of years old. Methods and tools do change over their career a lot, but not that fast.

  Administrative regulations, now that changes really fast. At least in my jurisdiction. But thank God, the problems stay the same.

  Beside, they google all the time. They don't rely on it, the way programmers may do, but it's much faster than consulting their professional networks and data sources.

  Of course it depends a lot on their professional area.

• by BrandoElFollito on 12/17/21, 12:20 PM

  I always wondered why there is no software to aid diagnosing that is used by all doctors.

  As an input you would provide the typical information doctors look for otr get from the user (cough, the elbow hurts, ...) and then suggest

      99.0%     common flu
       0.5%     ankle is broken
       0.5%     <neurological scary illness>
  

  It would then suggest a set of tests to got to XX% where the diagnosis is "good enough".

  It would help to avoid missing a broken ankle when this is flu season and the MD assumes that this is "like everyone".

  (the examples are extreme for some lightness)

• by helmsb on 12/17/21, 11:33 PM

  If the medical industry worked like modern web development then I would expect them to use Google more.

  “Sorry, we can’t do the heart surgery today, turns out our scalpels are made by one guy as an unpaid side project and he’s on vacation and it also turns out that for the last 5 years they’ve been mistakenly made of lead but no one noticed.

  Also, we stopped doing heart open heart surgeries like 2 years ago. We now do micro-surgeries where we just stab the patient over and over again until we hit the right spot. ”

• by jkki on 12/17/21, 9:44 AM

  We do. I use Google images heavily. You just use the right words to filter out the lay stuff ("conjunctival injection and chemosis differential" instead of "red swollen eye") and then you skim thru images until you find the exact diagnostic situation you're looking for. It's fast and specific. Havent used uptodate since the 2000s because it is not free.

• by Siira on 12/17/21, 9:39 AM

  The only reason other professions aren't relying as much on Google (with emphasis being on the relative intensity of use) is that their problems are harder to search (they don't get standardized error messages) and that they have levels upon levels of leeches asking for money in exchange for information.

• by starklevnertz on 12/17/21, 9:07 AM

  I very much hope my doctor relies a great deal on Google.

  Any expert in any field should hone their skills via google.

• by poniko on 12/17/21, 8:33 AM

  I wonder what the equivalent for a doctor is for me with the "complete guide to flexbox" is that I seem to Google every time I forget the difference between align items, justify items, align content.. just can't seem to get that into my head ..

• by vegai_ on 12/17/21, 11:32 AM

  Imagine if doctors read books instead of just winging it.

  This is the good old "you wouldn't download a car". Everyone would download a car if they could. And doctors would consult Doctor Overflow, MD all the time if such a thing existed. Perhaps it should?

• by aguasfrias on 12/17/21, 9:38 AM

  That phrase is just flamebait and that's probably why it's framed in quotation marks.

  That said, I'm not surprised to learn that doctors use Google. We go to doctors to benefit from their judgment and experience, not because we need to learn facts from them.

• by quantified on 12/17/21, 7:06 AM

  Beyond a few well-curated sites like DuodenumOverflow, I think they could get in just as much trouble with shallow and incomplete websites as programmers do. There are many poor results for many programming queries, only a few good or deep authorities.

• by raverbashing on 12/17/21, 9:42 AM

  Why imagine? If I'm not mistaken there are reference guides for symptoms in different specialities

  In fact differential diagnosis are just decision trees with a different name

  But you need to know the usual stuff and the day to day stuff by memory (same with programming)

• by sleepysysadmin on 12/17/21, 12:47 PM

  I've worked with healthcare in many different roles. I can tell you conclusively that doctors and nurses are absolutely googling the issue. Though often not actually google but something equivalent.

• by hycaria on 12/17/21, 9:25 AM

  The difference with non doctors is 1- knowing how to do a clinical exam 2- more often than not when looking at a disease, knowing it’s epidemiology or deducing it 3- knowing which questions to ask :)

• by GianFabien on 12/17/21, 7:37 AM

  To become a doctor you complete 5+ years university training then internship/residency before you are able to practice privately.

  Anybody can call themselves a programmer and get hired by a credulous manager.

• by bsza on 12/17/21, 9:34 AM

  As a programmer, I have a trivial way of finding out if a solution I found on the internet really works: run it. What is the equivalent procedure for doctors?

• by cosmotic on 12/17/21, 5:24 PM

  Human anatomy doesn't change; Computers and the software that run them change constantly.

• by DeathArrow on 12/17/21, 9:06 AM

  Programmers can afford to mistake. Doctors, pilots, train mechanics, firefighters don't.

• by nyanpasu64 on 12/17/21, 9:01 AM

  What does the color gamut picker at the bottom of the page do?

• by hardwaregeek on 12/17/21, 9:02 AM

  I noticed there was some Twitter discourse over something DHH had written about not having looking things up and copy/pasting being your main skill. There was some backlash and a lot of people responded emphatically that they look things up all the time and discouraging people from looking things up is bad, etc.

  I happen to agree with both takes and frankly I think if the people involved sat down and had a conversation, they probably would agree too. Looking things up is part of the job, but it is not the only part of the job and distilling programming down to “professional googling” is a disservice. I can look up what Bell’s Palsy is and read all I want, but it’s not the same as a doctor looking it up and reading about it. The same is true with programming.

• by adenozine on 12/17/21, 9:14 AM

  Well, imagine if engineers did 12+ years in university before coming to a codebase.

  In reality, someone with NO school and 12 years on the job is worth a lot more to my team and I, ymmv.

• by StephenJGL on 12/18/21, 4:31 AM

  News flash: they basically do.

• by bobowzki on 12/17/21, 9:12 AM

  We do.

• by ryanlol on 12/17/21, 11:03 AM

  (they do)

• by throwawayacc2 on 12/17/21, 9:29 AM

  Which vaccine was it?

• by evan_ on 12/17/21, 7:58 AM

  Maybe if doctors had to actually build a human they would. When I'm debugging I reach for Google a lot less than when I'm building something.