tatterdemalionamberite:

tbh one last lil irascible radical healthcare-for-the-people rant before I go to bed: I think narratives about the Genius Diagnostician often wind up serving as false propaganda about medicine, and about the abilities of the people who practice it.

in reality the majority of doctors are under an enormous amount of cognitive strain, and the layers of mystique around the profession and its artificial scarcity (limited by residency slots, mostly) are the things that insulate them, that prevent everyone else from recognizing that

and the information that’s available to doctors about things like antibiotic prescription, etc: a lot of it is available to all of us, and while it’s complicated as fuck, and a layperson can’t automatically be assumed to have the reading comprehension ability to understand it, it’s also not impenetrable, it’s not mystical; recognizing what parts of a paper you do and don’t understand is often enough to help you piece together the rest of it; it’s just dry science papers and manuals written in shorthand

so many of us who do have the capacity to read and understand such things wind up assuming that we don’t truly, because Doctors Know Things

but I’ve been burned enough times by doctors not knowing things I knew, and helped enough times by laypeople knowing things doctors didn’t, that I’m starting to see that the wall of that walled garden is not what I thought it was, and the purpose it serves is less beneficent than I once believed.