Distrust of doctors and dentists drives DIY research and wishful thinking

The 'Things to know when you get cancer' post got a warm reception, with one commenter hoping it saves lives. It also pulled in a reply pushing PNC-27 peptide and HIFU over 'the traditional route', and another saying doctors put as little care into patients as programmers do into software. The dentist thread went the same way: stories of drilling without anesthesia, followed by the line 'this is all doctors'.

The through-line is a trust gap. People write long guides because the system doesn't explain things to them, and a slice of readers then swing to unproven treatments. HN's technical crowd treats medicine like a codebase it can audit.

The nuance is that the best comments in the cancer thread are practical: questions to ask, things to bring, how to talk to surgeons. Those are the useful artifacts.