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I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

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Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#441

Post by jonny_eh »

sarchertech wrote: post #421
baby wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/tossing-flossing-2016081... . > the authors of these guidelines could not find convincing evidence to support flossing, and the guidelines are supposed to be evidence-based. According to reviews of the evidence published in 2011 and 2015, there is minimal, short-term, and generally unreliable evidence that flossing might reduce gum inflammation, but no convincing evidence that it p…

Reread your article. There’s no evidence that “brush your teeth and you’ll be fine”. There’s no good evidence that flossing is effective because there are nearly no large randomized controlled studies of flossing. Nearly all of the studies rely on self reporting. Flossing isn’t some kind of conspiracy. Dentists make no money off it. Many dental associations and government agencies outside of the US recommended it. De…

I suspect dentists push flossing as a way of convincing their patients that they're not doing enough, and can therefore push more services. "Well sir, if you only flossed regularly like we tell you, you wouldn't need all these regular deep cleanings!"

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#442

Post by xbmcuser »

Turskarama wrote: post #434
talonx wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that the fact that experience matters a lot too. The more variety of cases a doctor sees, the more the chances are that their diagnosis is going to be useful.

Yes and no, the more a doctor sees a particular diagnosis the less likely they are to consider anything else. Honestly of all the professions that could be enhanced by AI, medicine has the most to gain. An AI can remember a much larger data set than any human and look for correlations among many more dimensions.

Yes that's what I think as well. And it's sad that medical data being weaponized against you is the thing that takes more sound bytes than how medical data collection can improve diagnosis and healthcare. But with the way medical industry, insurance industry etc are we cant blame people for worrying about data collection specially in a country like the US where you can become destitute without medical insurance

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#443

Post by gcanyon »

For anyone who's interested, dental work costs half as much, or less, in Bangkok. I worked there for two years, and I needed five crowns -- multiple dentists had told me the enamel on my front upper teeth was thin and going to go sooner or later. So I got five crowns for about $2500 in Bangkok. I did not shop around at all, I just went to the local chain dentists and sat in the chair. You could get cheaper. My current dentist (Seattle) says they did excellent work.

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#444

Post by matheusmoreira »

mpsprd wrote: post #409
pfisherman wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I think people need to understand is the distinction between science and the practice of medicine. The practice of medicine is not science. The practice of medicine can be informed by science - to a degree that is almost entirely up to the practitioner. ; but it remains more art than science. The distinction is similar to that between an aviation maintenance and aerospace engineering. Sometimes doctors…

Doctors are technicians. Technicians with a large toolkit, but technicians nonetheless. When you compare their behaviors to IT it all starts making sense.

Being a doctor is like debugging a unique humongous software application with thousands of years of organic patchwork added by a godlike AI which just generates random code and watches the failed experiments die, no source code to any of it just the final binary, no debugger that lets you kill the process and dump its memory or trace its execution, just a bunch of test cases that cost lots of money to run and may yield false positives and false negatives making every bug some sort of heisenbug which may or may not show up when you try to reproduce it and reduces you to guessing with some percentage of certainty fuzzy logic, and even if you do manage to figure anything out in your desperate attempt to fix it you're reduced to essentially inserting event objects into the software's internal event system and hoping it produces the desired effects as it circulates throughout the entire system while hoping it won't adversely affect anything else and it's not even guaranteed to make anything better, or alternatively you pry the program open very carefully while it's running and cut code sections which grew tumorous or stitch together other sections which are leaking precious data or remodel the pipes so the data flows more efficiently, all to hopefully fix the problem while praying to god your attempt to fix it didn't actually make it worse because some malware randomly made it into the program while you worked on it.

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#445

Post by kbutler »

littlestymaar wrote: post #338
Etrnl_President wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine doing this on Canadian healthcare, having to wait months or years for each appointment, and nowadays they try to talk you into MAID to save resources…

Favorably comparing the US health system to the Canadian one is an interesting take indeed…

I know people in Canada who come to the US for healthcare (better care for specialties, shorter wait times).

I'm not aware of the reverse (admittedly, that would require more than just $$).

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#446

Post by cleandreams »

I went to a dentist for 20 years. He was a visiting professor in a dental school and was of the school, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My teeth are basically good and I take care of them well.

After he retired the new dentist who bought the practice had no end of things she wanted to do. I have a new crown or two and new fillings. What really got to me is that she kept wanting to put me in braces. I'm 67. I said no once, twice, thrice.

After that I found a new dentist who was a colleague of my old dentist. No unnecessary work!! I'm glad I left that practice.

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#447

Post by Firmwarrior »

wpietri wrote: post #417
pfisherman wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I think people need to understand is the distinction between science and the practice of medicine. The practice of medicine is not science. The practice of medicine can be informed by science - to a degree that is almost entirely up to the practitioner. ; but it remains more art than science. The distinction is similar to that between an aviation maintenance and aerospace engineering. Sometimes doctors…

For sure. A friend of mine went to med school and chose the general practitioner path. One time I was hanging out at their place, so I leafed through some of the GP journals on the coffee table. It seemed much more akin to car repair than to science.

yeah, I was just thinking about this today. Doctors seem less like engineers and more like QA testers or PMs trying to fix bugs since there's nobody better suited to the job available.

Hopefully medical science will keep advancing rapidly here..

Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)

#450

Post by demondemidi »

Its like when the optometrist assistant says, "Why are worried about glasses costing $700? Your insurance pays for it?"

Not exactly: my premiums go up and care goes down because of the insane gouging.

Then I tell them I'll just buy a few $50 pair on Zenni and they get wildly aggressive. Sorry, been wearing Zenni for a long time, they're excellent.

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