Just imagine if healthcare could figure things out that were out of the ordinary

complexity is the problem -as our understanding of the human body in health and illness expands - it becomes almost impossible for the average doctor to integrate it all - and then apply it reliably

its already at the level where humans are not good at dealing with it and increasing year on year

this is also one of the reasons for reductionist specialism - whereas all chronic conditions affect multiple systems - and a patient ends up getting referred to 5 different specialists - one for his heart - one for neurology - one for gastro-enterology etc etc - when it could be that a single infection is causing all the issues - but no one doctor has the holistic view

then there is the fact that for many of these emerging diseases that we contend with the teaching materials provided to the clinicians today are already 20-30 years behind what is known in the research field - so they couldn't possibly diagnose something as, say, a chronic bacterial infection - if they were taught such bacteria only cause acute infections ( as was thought to be the case with Bartonella for instance - and your PCP likely still firmly believes)

this is actually a very good use case for AI models - where you can feed in all the available information - and the model can give you the top 5 differential diagnosis to look for - and the tests to run to tell which

when tested - these type of models already perform better than doctors do today -

hospitals are just notoriously slow at adopting new technology - especially technology they see as disruptive or potentially threatening jobs

Yes to everything Garzie said.

I do recall what one dr said to me about our healthcare system (in Canada) when i was complaining about how it seems like they don't know what to do with chronic illneses. He said "the healthcare system is great for acute care but for chronic illness they are terrible". Couldn't be more true.

Dr's are underpaid and overworked. At least for the healthcare system in Canada which is not private, it basically sucks at treating chronic illness. I've gone through it and have seen almost every specialist. They don't know what to do. And a part of me does take their side in that it's not really their fault. Dr's go to med school, they are limited in what they learn, it's all from books. And every day there is a new illness popping up which requires years and years of research just to figure out what is causing it, forget about a cure.

Our system is overburdened due to a large amount of dr's who retired or quit during C-vid and now there are too many patients and not enough dr's. It is a big big mess. Cases like ours are just not handled properly because they don't know what to do with us. Sigh.

Astroman, being a patient and experiencing burnout when researching our illneses is absolutely unacceptable and to be honest sucks big time. I have taken a pause for now because I feel so overwhelmed with researching and seeing people say they got better with such and such treatment. My head is swimming with too many treatment options to research. So I am going to take a break and restart at a later time.

Wow Girlie! You are one lucky patient to have had such a great dr. They are hard to come by. Crazy how she went from medicine to aesthetics. What a jump. Yes I agree re the 15 min appts. I found out about this with a recent family dr i went to see. His secretary told me i'm booked for 15 mins and thats how long the appts are for. Whatever happened to going in and the dr taking their time to talk to you about your concern? It doesn't exist anymore. They just don't have the time.

I am still trying to find one to take me on. I have several other issues that make my case complex so it's proving to be harder than I thought it would be.