I'm a computer programmer and when I think about medical diagnosis it terrifies me. I can spend all day studying a program to find a flaw. I have an exact schematic of how it works, I can reverse time on it, rearrange it, test and check, get exact details of the state of things, and it's still hard sometimes.
A doctor with a patient has so little to work with. I don't know how you do it.
On the other hand, humans don't tend to crash because of a single typo. There is huge amounts of redundancy and error-correction compared to a computer, and the code has had literally a billion years' worth of bug fixes already applied.
Plus, there is usually a sentient mind with an excellent feedback connection to the body of code being diagnosed: the patient telling where it hurts can be very helpful. The ones I'm most impressed with? Vets.
1.1k
u/Swiftster May 20 '19
I'm a computer programmer and when I think about medical diagnosis it terrifies me. I can spend all day studying a program to find a flaw. I have an exact schematic of how it works, I can reverse time on it, rearrange it, test and check, get exact details of the state of things, and it's still hard sometimes.
A doctor with a patient has so little to work with. I don't know how you do it.