Saturday, October 31, 2009

Doctors also have their own way of thinking.



earlier post was about two ways to solve a given problem, engineering and design approach. Then i met the third kind the "doctors".

Recent controversial insect bite/infection/allergy lead me to search of a skin specialist. searching for a skin specialist on a monday morning by not attending your class is not the best thing you can do. you step out and take bike and ride around and then you go the all the skin clinics you see. no doctor is there on monday morning. finally you call up one random doc looking at the clinic board and then she asks you to come in the evening. I asked a simple question is it ok to wait till evening? she asked how long it has been there. I answered 2 days she says then its ok.. if you survive 2 days youll survive few more hours. Impressive.. logical explanation. I went back home and reached the clinic at 17:00 as asked to. the clinic is closed. i thought to myself importance of time is losing its value. but thankfully in 10 minutes a sister arrives opens the clinic.. another 15 mins the doctor shows up. calls me inside. i know i have to pay 150 bucks to her so i know to extract all the info i can. I show it to her and give her my suggestions of what it can be. she listens carefully. then i ask her can it be chicken pox? she says have you ever had it before i say yes. she denies that chicken pox can happen again. i gave her the example of classmate, yet she said its impossible. I was like fine, ignorance is bliss. so i ask her what is that am suffering from? and there is a pause.
then she says.. it CAN be SOMETHING like a VIRAL INFECTION. I asked why does it come? she says there is NO EXPLANATION to that. it comes and goes. take these meds and it will be fine. she gave me one ointment for insect bites, one tab for allergy and one tab for infection. played it safe.

All i could infer from the incident is that doctors are very easy to manipulate. their diagnosis depends on your complaints. So you can manage to get whatever disease you want if you know how the doctor is going to think about your complaints. They have option A B and C. they see which ever you fit in the best you are that. basically you suffer from something that text book says you can suffer from. there are things which are not possible at all.. cancer wont be cured till the textbook says its curable, Chicken pox wont happen again if the textbook says it cant. So design approach is much more different from a doctors approach as the first thing designer will say if some one says not possible is why not? where as doctor has no explanation to things like these. there might be some doctors who might be good enough to think outside the books but its a general PATTERN observed in doctors. same is with the psychiatrist who does counselling to people. he knows only that side of you what you tell him. understanding these patterns is much easy once you are in design as you understand the systems and how they work so as to modify them according to your need. If i come along any new kind of thinking then i shall update this.

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