Subjective medicine
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Feb 12, 2018
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I was talking to my doctor about treatment options for an ailment, and I said I wanted to approach it scientifically. I wanted to take some sort of measurement before treatment, then a measurement after treatment to quantify the effect, instead of relying on how I feel before and after, which is subjective. He said something that sort of blew my mind: It might be better to measure the outcome subjectively if the outcome is subjective in nature. In other words, if I could measure some quantity before and after and they showed no difference yet I felt better, the treatment is a success despite the measurement being inconclusive. I feel like a more rigorous response would be that the process needs a better metric, but that's not the point. I thought his response was pretty insightful coming from a profession that often operates from a sort of guess-and-check framework. #health
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