Doctors have physician assistants and registered nurses along with EHR medical databases the hospitals subscribe to for aiding in their patient diagnosis and medical workup via always up-to-date medical coding insurance industry practices (for billing patient health insurance $$$). Any exotic infections/diseases or surgery are farmed out to specialist doctors who are also following medical billing guidelines and a narrow workup to diagnose patients within their specialty.

Lawyers have paralegals that dig through the case studies and case law for them along with law databases like LexisNexis.

>You think I couldn't diagnose that cold

I think you'd get the 90% case due simply to the preponderance of people who have a cold instead of some other, more rare condition with similar symptoms. Problem is you'd cause harm to everyone who doesn't have a simple cold because you have no idea what you're doing.

Comparing the knowledge needed to be a good doctor to what is required to throw up some bloated SPA? C'mon, get over yourself.

Doctors make a lot of mistakes too, just like programmers. But with doctors, it's easy to blame it on the vagaries of the human body. So even when the "cure" doesn't, people expect that because of the differences between individual bodies. This gives them a pass of sorts when they screw up, the medicine doesn't work, the side-effects kill you, you get a fatal infection in the hospital, etc.

With programming, if you are designing the control system for an aircraft and it fails, people will be able to find out exactly what failed and why, and who to blame.

It's hard to compare doctors and programmers, because there are many levels of medical professionals, just like there are many levels of programming.

That's a funny comparison considering doctors must pay outrageous amounts of money for malpractice insurance, but engineers are never held personally responsible for a bug (legally, at least.)

I think you're grossing oversimplifying what goes into making each of these everyday decisions -- though they look simple. Misdiagnosing a cold when its ready a (deadly) brain/amoeba infection is easy to do particularly when the patient presents with vague descriptions of how they feel and 'where it hurts'.

The ability of an experienced professional to quickly decide these things comes after many years of hard-won skill building...

And you really believe your stressed, sick-of-you-already, doctor is going to even consider a brain amoeba when you present flu-like symptoms?

They either have a checklist, or they wing it. You give obscenely too much credit.

Medical mistakes are incredibly common. There are thousands of people who DIE from prescription accidents each year.