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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I think you have the terrible take. Untrained people shouldn't be self-diagnosing based on hearing a list of symptoms, the brain is too good at tricking itself and it is too easy to even give yourself symptoms you don't have.
And I don't expect any one doctor to know of every treatment that exists for every illness, because that's what collaborative knowledge bases are for. A carefully moderated medical Wikipedia that can be contributed to by doctors and researchers.
But all of this wouldn't make the pharmesutical companies as much money as peddling to hypochondriacs so instead we have ads.
At the end of the day the doctor is the one who does the research. A doctor may recommend something else instead if they don't think a drug is a good fit.
This is literally what everyone does. How else would it possibly even work? "Oh shit you mean my foot numbness is a symptom of diabetes?". Like, this is just how human interaction works.
What does this have to do with what we're talking about. Are you saying that the doctor should just input every symptom that every patient gives them to a medical Wikipedia? Because otherwise how would they know of new drugs? They may think they know exactly how to treat whatever symptom, but if they're not continually looking it up very single time, they'll miss new meds.
What you described is not even remotely a solution to the actual problem of 1. people not knowing their symptoms are potentially from a disease that has a treatment. and 2. doctors knowing that treatment exists