As someone who has been debugging their own chronic illnesses for the past ten years (and doing better than my doctors), I wouldn’t consider the medical diagnostic process to be “debugging” at all. And that is exactly the problem. Doctors seem to be stuck thinking like bureaucrats following probabilistic flowcharts, and they’re incapable of actually thinking about a problem and debugging it.

The behavior seems to be so deeply ingrained in every single doctor I’ve seen that it seems impossible to change. I suspect they must have this drilled into them in school and residency, then it seems like every decision is constrained by insurance requirements. As far as I can tell, the situation is hopeless.