I’ve encountered many doctors in many settings and I’ve been able to clearly conclude that most of them are idiots. A lot of them can’t even balance their checkbooks.

With all the tools available to modern medicine – the blood tests and M.R.I.’s and endoscopes – you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930’s. “No improvement!” was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world – one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care – and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year.

How can this be happening? And how is it not a source of national outrage?

A BIG part of the answer is that all of the other medical progress we have made has distracted us from the misdiagnosis crisis.

Under the current medical system, doctors, nurses, lab technicians and hospital executives are not actually paid to come up with the right diagnosis. They are paid to perform tests and to do surgery and to dispense drugs.

There is no bonus for curing someone and no penalty for failing, except when the mistakes rise to the level of malpractice. So even though doctors can have the best intentions, they have little economic incentive to spend time double-checking their instincts, and hospitals have little incentive to give them the tools to do so.

Its a sad sign of the time when “You get what you pay for” with a doctor.

I have friends that are often ill, and I am glad they find solace confiding in a so called professional for advice. I am just scared as hell that they are having experiences like I have had where the doctor is “guessing” what the hell is wrong with them, and most likely getting it wrong. Its an educated guess I know, but an education bought and paid for with more greenbacks that i’ll ever see. Its an education frought with imperfections, designed to make all in the profession equal while at the same time having no guage for the skill required for the job.

Run like hell from doctors in America. They’re almost all stupid. (From what I’ve seen, most of them are greedy and selfish, too.)