Mainly because it is genuinely exhausting for any medical practitioner. That lots of patients "enjoy" googling symptoms and coming up with far-fetched self-diagnoses is a given. But couple that with the perceived intellectual superiority of (software) engineers and you get a recipe for disaster. It's the equivalent of a doctor leaning over your shoulder while you're coding and telling you to remove random keywords.
Like any field I think there is a spectrum of quality and there are some really great doctors that know a lot, some really bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones.
I've had a doctor (in the bay area) tell me that I should smoke a cigarette instead of having coffee if I'm having trouble sleeping, but want to keep working on something. Another talk positively about the butter coffee guy. I think the main reason they don't talk about a lot of options is probably time constraint and the common case being right most of the time. This means if you're actually not a common case you're probably better off investing your own time to try and figure things out too.
I like this article though, I think there is some similarity of style in troubleshooting software and disease diagnosis (just very different things to reason about).
I don't think it's as bad as removing random keywords, but given how limited resources are in medicine, I can see how a provider wouldn't want to explain why every individual's hypothesis is likely incorrect.
On the flip side, misdiagnoses are surprisingly common, and I think it's worthwhile for any provider to take a closer look if a patient has concerns.
If anything, I think this illustrates how much we need to reorganize and improve medicine. It's not like medicine is alone in this respect either, many sectors are inefficient, but when medicine is life altering and can be life or death, it's pretty high on the list IMO.
I think it’s because there’s a lot of ambiguity and “best guesses” in medical science and there’s no equivalent to programming documentation or manpages for medical treatment. Building code is for all intents and purposes a pretty objective and repeatable field of study. Whereas I would liken a medical treatment more to penetration testing because you’re trying to get an established logical system to accept new input/logic (medicine/procedures) rather than trying to build a logical system from scratch (or with building blocks)
Everybody feels the same way - mechanics feel exactly the same. IT tech support people feel the same.
And, you know, it seems like an increasing number of medical professionals just defer to whatever the patient wants anyway. What's the point of saying you're the expert if you won't be the expert?
