> Then in real life example you will have real doctors and nurses giving conflicting advices and having wildly different viewpoints on the details.
Exactly. Real life example - someone I know asked her doctor about getting the Moderna covid vaccine while pregnant. The doctor not only said it was ok, but also verbally recommended it and gave her a written paper to help her get the vaccine. She was able to get it a couple days ago. Then yesterday the World Health Organization announced that pregnant women should not be getting the Moderna vaccine because they were not included in the trials.
So who’s right here? It’s hard to trust a “real doctor” when something like this happens.
It also happens that, doctors in particular, barely see you for 5-15min, that is not enough time for them to fully understand what is going on with you and your whole history. It’s only enough time for them to make a quick judgement based on their pattern matching abilities from their own experience and then give, an educated, recommendation. But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more, and if their recommendations don’t work for you, they usually don’t really care and won’t go down the rabbit whole with you, at the most they’ll just refer you to someone else.
But that ... that's not exactly incompatible. The WHO makes very simple blanket statements that are safe in general.
A doctor usually looks at an individual. (And we know a lot of pregnant women got infected with COVID. We know that hospitalization was higher for them, but also that mortality is the same - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6925a1.htm?s_cid=mm... , so the immune reaction should be the same too)
The real problem is that it's impossible for a non-expert to gauge the expertise of any of these entities (your full-sized real-life walking-talking doctor who you know for a deacade, the WHO and anyone in between). Even simply asking many questions is just the illusion of getting informed (not just because there's rarely any time for proper answers as you mentioned), but because the answers are biased, so this naturally biases the next question too. (Unless there's enough time and effort to go through years of science and try to falsify whatever theory is being communicated with very targeted questions, it's close to useless/futile effort.)
> But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more,
Yep. Agreed. Also usually primary care physicians are better at "bedside manner" and pattern matching than at real medical science. (Because it's not really their job to have 20 doctorates in every subfield of biology.)
Exactly. Real life example - someone I know asked her doctor about getting the Moderna covid vaccine while pregnant. The doctor not only said it was ok, but also verbally recommended it and gave her a written paper to help her get the vaccine. She was able to get it a couple days ago. Then yesterday the World Health Organization announced that pregnant women should not be getting the Moderna vaccine because they were not included in the trials.
So who’s right here? It’s hard to trust a “real doctor” when something like this happens.
It also happens that, doctors in particular, barely see you for 5-15min, that is not enough time for them to fully understand what is going on with you and your whole history. It’s only enough time for them to make a quick judgement based on their pattern matching abilities from their own experience and then give, an educated, recommendation. But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more, and if their recommendations don’t work for you, they usually don’t really care and won’t go down the rabbit whole with you, at the most they’ll just refer you to someone else.