snarpreplies:

nostalgebraist:

There’s no way to write this post without sounding really smug, but: yesterday a medical professional said to me “I … think the half-life of alcohol is six hours” and I nodded but internally I was like “alcohol usually doesn’t have first-order kinetics, you’d be better off just using the ‘you burn off one drink an hour’ rule that everyone knows”

Whenever something like this happens I’m split between “I don’t want to be That Guy” and “but what if at some point I trust a doctor about something I don’t know and actually they’re just wrong”

At some point you have and will again. All doctors are necessarily incompetent to advise off the top of their heads in at least one area in which they’re expected to do that. In the US, it’s probably best to assume that GPs are always at least a little confused about everything they do, due to the current nature of how they’re licensed and regulated. At least this one prefaced the remark with “I think.”

It’s just an institutionally-imposed Dunning-Kruger thing: when the standard which people think you’re held to is so much higher than the one you’re actually held to, you’re going to think you’re doing better than you are. The main thing to look for in a medical professional is just the willingness to admit that they’re confused and to try to correct that.

Yeah, the expression of uncertainty was welcome.  And yeah, I think this is pretty much inevitable given the number of things these people are supposed to know about.

In this case, it wasn’t a GP, it was a psychiatric nurse in charge of prescribing me medication.  Alcohol is, of course, not a medication, but since it’s so commonly used and can interact with many medications this does seem like the sort of thing she should know.

(via snarpreplies)