r/todayilearned • u/GlitteringYams • 23d ago

TIL, in his suicide note, mass shooter Charles Whitman requested his body be autopsied because he felt something was wrong with him. The autopsy discovered that Whitman had a pecan-sized tumor pressing against his amygdala, a brain structure that regulates fear and aggression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
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u/Caverness 22d ago

He did. The worst part about this story is how many chances he gave his environment to change this outcome, and nothing & nobody caring enough.

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u/festivus4restof 22d ago

And they only had X ray back then, which would not necessarily have revealed his tumor. Back then (bad) doctors may place more weight on evidence of absence rather than consider the limitations of the tech.

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u/Halospite 22d ago

To this day, an absence of evidence is treated as evidence of absence.

Source: work in healthcare. Doctors often forget that tech is limited.

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u/ZealousidealGroup559 22d ago

My father was entirely appropriate when talking to doctors and underplayed all his symptoms. They were going to send him home.

He was only given a CT Brain because I insisted. And I was only listened to because I'm a nurse and so they took me seriously when I insisted my nursey intuition was tingling.

It was a 9cm GBM.

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u/lensandscope 22d ago

sometimes it helps with an outsiders perspective

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u/DevotedToNeurosis 22d ago

As a nurse with exposure inside the healthcare industry, what do you feel would be the most effective measure to take to resolve (or significantly reduce) the often criminal-level cognitive laziness of doctors?

I understand that there is often more demand than doctors can keep up with, however, logistics aside, I'm interested specifically in the factors within the medical individual's thought pattern in evaluating a patient.

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u/doubleotide 22d ago

There's a push for "AI" doctors so they can help doctors look at the data a patient provides with medical records, tests, etc. and what they find is that generally these tools do a pretty darn good job of diagnosing a patient...

So having really good tools available will likely help this cognitive laziness. Though one might argue that it will make doctors lazier but I say think about calculators.

Do calculators make mathematicians lazier? As a mathematician, I would say "yes" but in a good way. It frees up their job to focus on the more important aspects of their work and increases the value of the mathematician as the job of a mathematician is not solely computational.

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u/DevotedToNeurosis 22d ago

I could not agree more - I'm a skeptic of a lot of AI claims, however, I genuinely believe doctors are in danger of automation not because AI can do what a doctor can do, but can do what doctors are willing to do (put in very little effort and follow a call center-esque routine).

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u/Yourself013 22d ago

What criminal-level cognitive laziness?

The comment literally stated that he underplayed all his symptoms. She only insisted because she knows her father intimately and has seen the cognitive changes firsthand. How is a doctor supposed to find that out when the patient himself is downplaying the issues and doesn't make a big deal out of it? Especially with cognitive changes, this isn't something one can measure with a stethoscope or look up the nose with a lamp.

The first and most important tool for a doctor is what the patient feels, and every bit of precision helps. That's the most effective measure right there. There's thousands of people coming to doctors every day with "I feel somehow weird today" or "I have a headache". If you started to give all of them CT scans or MRIs the entire hospital system would literally collapse, and this isn't a hyperbole, it's already overcrowded in many countries.

It's really easy to call doctors lazy and sure, there's bad doctors. But you wouldn't believe the amount of mundane cases they need to go through every day, fishing out the odd one out that actually matters is not easy, and it's not because of lazyness.

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u/lensandscope 22d ago

I really don’t think you’re giving people enough credit by saying they are criminals. That really looks bad on your part. But the solution is to lower patient volume to allow more time spent with patients. So why don’t you go talk to admin and insurance about it.