Don’t get started about doctors being competent because they got themselves a degree.

Obviously someone who hasn’t studied knows less than someone who got a medical degree. But a medical degree is the absolute minimum, the base knowledge. Current research goes way beyond anything a medical degree can teach, and quite obviously so. Medical knowledge is vast, no one is or will ever able to know all of it. Getting a degree gives you a base, a knowledge about the most common ailments, theoretically the ability to get more knowledge if necessary, the ability to assess which new knowledge is useful, and so on. But unless you are specifically well-read in a particular topic, even a doctor with a medical degree is unlikely to know the full picture about a particular ailment.

And even if someone is well-read in a particular topic, human medical knowledge is still incredibly bad, there’s so many things we just don’t know. Even with perfect, up-to-date knowledge on a topic, it’s easily possible to have no explanation or no solution.

So doctors, just like any other humans, go around acting all knowledgeable, and yes, they are more knowledgeable than others. And yes, for common ailments, that have been well-studied, and that they have done additional reading about, they may give good advice. But all doctors are also fallible, they’re all prone to normal human mental biases, like confirmation bias and so on. And they work in a deeply flawed system, completely overworked, too many patients, too little time per patient, and so on.

So it’s very likely all this medical degree, all this knowledge in a doctor’s head is entirely useless for the current situation. You may go to a doctor, and they might not have read the current literature on the ailment you have. They may not identify the ailment you have correctly because it’s very similar to another one. They may not be very thorough, as they may have personal issues or just pressure in a terrible system.

And then someone comes to them with a little bit rarer thing. They slap a “common thing” label on them quickly because they pattern-match from their own incomplete knowledge. As a patient, you’re left feeling like something is missing, and there likely is. It’s very very simple to know more than doctors, research is mostly public, and no doctor has read all research, and you may just hit their specific knowledge gap. In total, they still know much more than you, but in this very specific ailment, you might suddenly know more than the doctor, at least partially, just because a doctor can never know everything.

And then you try to explain to them that there must be something more to it than they know, than they say, and what is the result? “Do you have a medical degree? No? Why do you assume you know more than me?” It’s not an unreasonable argument, and patients are often exactly as stupid and filled with mental biases as doctors are.

But if a patient’s needs are not met, if the “common thing” diagnosis does not satisfy them, if there are unexplained things left, this “I am the doctor, I have the degree” is utterly irrelevant, it is necessary to listen and to consider alternatives, and to also consider one’s (the doctor’s) knowledge might not be enough. It’s necessary to be empathetic and take your time, something rarely done by doctors. It is necessary to explain. Necessary to work to come to a common ground. All not done by doctors, or any human, very often.

I guess what I’m saying is, if there is a question still in a patient’s mind, then the doctor didn’t do a very good job. And most doctors do a very bad job.

No I don’t have a degree in medical but I have studied medical from Yale. I acknowledge that I am nowhere as knowledgeable as a doctor but if a doctor can’t cooperate and work with the patient why are they in that position. I’m not saying the things I bring up would be 100% correct. Though in the past I did this

Diagnosis hypothesis

Possible diagnosis 1#

Symptoms I know I have

Possible Diagnosis 2#

Symptoms I have

Possible Diagnosis as many as it takes

Symptoms I have

Then

My best guessed diagnosis

With symptoms making me consider

I look for them to help me work through these and see which are more likely than find the correct one if any are.

I wanted you to see this part, @Azzu@lemm.ee

Since in this instance. This is how I found out I had Bipolar and BPD. While it’s harder for medical specifically. It’s not impossible.