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datadataeverywhere comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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I'm with wnoise, but I have a question to clarify my position.
How many diagnoses do you expect a competent physician to get wrong? I would say that more than 1 in 20 is at least reasonable. However, without meeting CronoDAS, or performing tests of any kind, based purely on the scant evidence in his posts, you have diagnosed him with a micronutrient deficiency, and have a confidence of 95% in your diagnosis. Seriously? What's your prior? Even for thiamine, a 60% confidence that this near-stranger is deficient in it seems dramatically too high.
I expect physicians to be bewildered rather a lot. I spent years severely anemic. My father is an MD, my uncle is an MD, I saw a variety of doctors during this time, I was eating cups and cups and cups of ice every single day and was unremittingly tired and ghostly pale, partway through I became a vegetarian - and it took the Red Cross's little machine that goes beep to figure out that maybe I wasn't getting enough iron. I have a vast host of symptoms less serious than that which no doctor, med student, or random interlocutor has been able to offer plausible guesses about.
I expect bewildered people to make things up.
Agreed. Even if they don't make things up, the responsible thing to do is to iterate through harmless or nearly-harmless treatments for conditions that the physician thinks are unlikely, but more likely than any other ideas he or she has.
This is exactly the opposite problem; not being at all bewildered or in doubt, despite a paucity of evidence. Doctors do that too.
Both making things up and jumping to conclusions happen because doctors are humans and are wired to see patterns, whether or not they exist. While we're busy refining the art of human rationality, we ought to try to curb that behavior.