When I told my Rheumatologist at my first appointment some of the symptoms I’ve had, she argued that those things weren’t happening. She said I wasn’t having neuropathy. The neck pain had nothing to do with RA. Several other things she scoffed at. This morning it occurred to me, why waste time telling doctors about symptoms? Doctors don’t actually figure out anything or do problem solving. Their only function is to gather the list of symptoms and from that make a diagnosis. Nothing they do involves original thoughts or problem solving. Their sole function is to match up symptoms to an ailment. If there’s a symptom in the list that you give them that doesn’t fit with their diagnosis, they throw out that symptom. There’s really not any original thought processes involved in medicine. It would be fairly simple to write a computer application that diagnoses symptoms and just have doctors to verify the results and assign treatment.