> It is not possible for a non-physician to be an informed healthcare consumer.
I never fail to find myself astonished that people in a highly technical field, which is extremely refractory to the layman, nonetheless commonly feel themselves perfectly competent to operate in another highly technical field, entirely orthogonal to their own. The Renaissance man, made obsolete by complexity, is one with history; specialization is the order of the day.
There is no controversy in the statement that not everyone is, or can be, equipped to serve as his own programmer or systems administrator; indeed, the very existence of the field in which most of us find our vocation suffices to demonstrate that fact. Yet many of these very same people consider the mere suggestion, that the same should be true of the field of medicine, as nigh unto an insult direct -- as though it carried some imputation of essential incompetence, rather than being a statement of trivially evident fact. I despair of ever understanding why this should be, live however long I might.
I never fail to find myself astonished that people in a highly technical field, which is extremely refractory to the layman, nonetheless commonly feel themselves perfectly competent to operate in another highly technical field, entirely orthogonal to their own. The Renaissance man, made obsolete by complexity, is one with history; specialization is the order of the day.
There is no controversy in the statement that not everyone is, or can be, equipped to serve as his own programmer or systems administrator; indeed, the very existence of the field in which most of us find our vocation suffices to demonstrate that fact. Yet many of these very same people consider the mere suggestion, that the same should be true of the field of medicine, as nigh unto an insult direct -- as though it carried some imputation of essential incompetence, rather than being a statement of trivially evident fact. I despair of ever understanding why this should be, live however long I might.