alt Hacker NewsThis is all professionals.
Actual expertise, competence and integrity is typically extremely expensive and hard to come by. Luckily, most cases are fairly routine that the majority of the time for the average person it doesn't really matter in the end. It's not like most can afford the best anyway.
Just take any profession that your retail consumer might get access to and the same spread applies.
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> This is all professionals. [...] Just take any profession that your retail consumer might get access to and the same spread applies.
The big difference is that if those other professionals fuck up, then the damage is usually done to some object. An object you can get fixed again (by someone else), or replaced, or you can even throw it away perhaps. This doesn't apply to doctors. The damage they can do can be irreversible, the damage is done to your body. This means they should take all the more responsibility. Yet what we see is that they disclaim responsibility to such a huge extent that most of those other professionals can't.
Most doctors have a god complex.
"extremely expensive and hard to come by"
For doctors it's mostly the latter. I've had consultations with surgeons and talked to many (ex)-patients of them and the correlation between price and skill is not great. Some with the best reputation rely very heavily on marketing and many have just as many skeletons in their closet.
It is difficult to convince a man of something his livelihood depends on him misunderstanding.
Every professional has their peeves and once set they imagine them everywhere. I suspect part of taking your car to a second mechanic is finding one who is neutral on the exact problem you're having. I had a car fail emissions and the diagnosis was a new set of injectors for a good fraction of the value of the vehicle. My fiancee got a recommendation from a coworker for a shop near our apartment. Replaced some worn EGR hoses for $200 and I passed with flying colors. Same shop talked me out of another repair I thought I needed. Kept going to that guy for several years after we moved to the opposite end of town.
The other knock on lesson that people should internalize is that you, and only you, are ultimately responsible for your own healthcare and maintenance. If you try to completely outsource the responsibility of that to a healthcare professional, you are bringing risk upon yourself that the professional is either incompetent or has misaligned incentives (such as bringing in additional revenue from unnecessary procedures).