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jongjongtoday at 12:06 AM3 repliesview on HN

As a coder, I'm realising more and more that the human body isn't so different from a computer. When you try to fix something without having complete understanding of all the relevant parts of the system, you will invariably introduce new issues. With a machine as complex as the human body, it seems inevitable that the field of medicine would be a game of whac-a-mole. Finding solutions which don't create new problems is hard and should not be taken for granted.


Replies

kylehotchkisstoday at 12:13 AM

Add on that there is no complete understanding of this system with all the Unknown Unknowns etc and you can see why we should test this stuff better before letting hims.com just disperse it across the american populace

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akira2501today at 12:43 AM

Yea, except without error checking, and fully analog technology.

Although, "single cosmic ray upset events," are just as devastating.

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GauntletWizardtoday at 12:20 AM

A computer is much more likely than your body to have small, self contained parts that just function. Your body is the result of millions of years of accidental evolution - See the canonical example of the laryngeal nerve in a giraffe. Computer programs are often designed to be small and modular. They might have to worry about memory layout shifting because some other program grew - That's nothing like your spleen trying to occupy the same physical space as your stomach and causing digestion issues.

For all of medical science's experience and history with debugging the human body, there's still so much more to understand.