There is a strange paradox in how we look for medical specialists. We are so used to it that we barely notice how absurd it actually is.
Imagine if ordering flowers worked the same way. To get a decent bouquet, you would need to ask friends where they bought flowers two years ago, then read reviews where half are either fake or written by people with very questionable taste, then visit a couple of shops, talk to the florist, try to guess by intuition whether they know what they are doing or not. And even then, you still have no guarantee the flowers will last more than a day. And this is about flowers. A pretty simple system. The worst mistake here is a bad mood.
Now imagine the exact same process in medicine. Except the price of a mistake is your health.
The core problem is that a patient is almost never a qualified consumer of medical services. And importantly, they should not be. When I plug my laptop into a socket, I do not need to understand power systems, voltage standards, or protection circuits. I only need two things: the laptop should charge, and it should not burn. Everything else is the system’s responsibility.
In medicine, for some reason, the opposite is considered normal. The patient is expected to figure out which specialist to see, how qualified they are, which treatments are “right,” which tests make sense, and which do not. Reviews do not help much either, because most people cannot objectively assess the quality of medical care. If it did not get worse, that is already considered a win. If it got better, the doctor must be great. What actually happened and why, in most cases, nobody really knows.
As a result, we have a market where a person, often in a vulnerable state, is forced to make complex decisions without the necessary expertise. It looks about as reasonable as asking an airline passenger to evaluate the pilot’s qualifications and the condition of the engine before takeoff, just because they are supposed to be “informed.”
In reality, the patient’s request is very simple. It is not about “the best doctor according to the internet.” It is about the system taking responsibility for complexity, uncertainty, and risk. So a person does not need to understand medicine, just like they do not need to understand the power grid or how the internet works. They should simply receive a high-quality service.
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