Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor

On the other hand, I agree that more data isn't necessarily better. There are plenty of examples. E.g.:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/prostate-cancer-tes...

If you do early prostate screening, you get worse medical outcomes than when you don't screen. Or consider whole-body scans:

http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/news/newdetarget.cfm?ID=5

They will detect a lot of stuff that doesn't matter, but proving that it doesn't matter will be expensive and possibly harmful.

You see a similar phenomenon in investing. As Fooled by Randomness explains well, for most people the best strategy is to set your investments and look at them very rarely. If you watch the investment news all day and trade actively, you may not do better, you could easily do worse, and you'll certainly be much more stressed. But still, there is an endless supply of day-traders.

Why are we excusing this? This is an allocation and resource problem.

Frankly, I never understood why I need to schedule an appointment with a doctor and also visit a pharmacy to get drugs like anti-acids, allergy medicine, short doses of painkillers, antibiotics, short doses of anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants, etc. My doctor spends, what I imagine, most of his time on trivial issues and I sympathize with those who have non-trivial issues. It doesn't seem fair to them that they get the same 30 minutes I get for my minor issues.

I think society needs to ask itself if we need a full-fledged doctor for many of these tasks. The politics of healthcare are really ugly. Sorry, but a lot of this level 1 stuff could be done by a non-expert. I should be able to just buy these things. Or, at worst, pharmacists should be able to prescribe this stuff. The system as-is is designed to maximize labor, thus billable hours, for doctors. Its a mess when it comes to actually providing care.

I understand there's potential for abuse here but I kinda don't care. In my society you have the freedom to stuff your face with Big Macs 3x a day, smoke, become an alcoholic, and soon smoke pot all day. Those all have major risks and are completely legal and mainstream. Yet when I want to heal myself, suddenly the regulators, rent-seekers, and moralists come out of the woodwork.

Think about the some of the implications of that statement for a while.

It really is no wonder that the softer sciences have a reproducibility problem.

I had the EXACT same feeling as you, and feel we're copying the US in only the wrong aspects. "A bunch of busy, reasonably bright people caught up in an insane circus" sums it up better than I could. I'll digress here and vent about another aspect of it, but I liked your links about too much data, thanks.

Not sure how it is in the US, but what is strange for me here is that it's not only about cutting-edge tech, even old stuff (Email? Messaging of any kind? Hell, phone calls!) is not really used by our hospitals and doctors.

Here, if you do any type of imaging exams, y'll have to wait a few days for the results, get them on the lab - physically -, schedule another doctor appointment, wait an hour or so in the waiting room just so your doctor can take a look at the images and tell you, basically: "Ok, you're fine", or "Hmm, I need these other exams to be sure. Here, take this piece of paper where I describe what I need and get it done".

Seriously, we use instant messages delivered to phones all around the world simultaneously to share pictures of ourselves, of our cats, dogs and dinners, just for a giggle. And we can't do it to save lives!