You know, watching “House” tonight, it really struck me how a lot of the time, medicine is just a matter of science and statistics. If a patient has symptoms x, y, z, and a history of q, r, s, then chances are they have this. It’s a massive equation to be sure, but an equation nonetheless.
There’s a great deal of educated guesswork by doctors based on medical literature, personal experience, and bouts of brillance. However, I’d bet that 99% of cases are solved by the first two. It seems logical that almost any medical problem can be solved by walking a self-referencing tree-structure of nodes, from symptoms to cures. For example, if a patient was experiencing blurry vision, one could climb up the tree to find all possible causes. Branches can be eliminated based on observation, and prioritized according to statistics. Similarly, one could climb down the tree to find possible treatments, based on the causes.
As more observations and treatment history are fed into the tree, the active branches for the patient would become more and more narrow, and (hopefully) the statistically most probable path from cause to cure would become evident.
Now picture this, a massive tree structure being continually fed with new paths and new statistics by the global medical community. Branches can be refined by specialists, and subject to massive peer review. Basically, the tree would represent the (entire) knowledge of the medical community, including drug-interactions on a level that no human could memorize.
I would definitely want a doctor to assess what The Tree finds. But I would also jump at the opportunity for the best medical minds in the world to contribute to my health care. It’s Distributed Medicine 