Driving in to work today, I listened to an NPR story about patients seeking medical information online. The general idea was that patients are, in some cases, better informed with information regarding their specific symptoms than their physician is during their initial consult. In fairness to doctors, it’s pretty easy to understand why this would happen. As a lawyer, I’m frequently approached by someone seeking legal advice about an area of the law outside of my area of expertise. I can’t give them an educated answer on the spot. A meaningful response would require thoughtful research. I think people give doctors even less latitude. They expect them to be omniscient, or nearly so.

I had a related experience a couple of years ago, which I wrote about here. My bulldog, Bella, had developed a limp, which had not resolved itself after a couple of weeks of restricted activity. I took her to a local vet, who relatively quickly suggested that it appeared to be shoulder dysplasia, and that she wanted to have a visiting orthopedic specialist come in and look at her xrays, after which she expected a surgery would be required. An hour of web research turned up a number of bulldogs roughly the same age as mine, presenting with similar symptoms. Several owners outlined horror stories of repeated surgeries and staggering vet bills still failing to solve the problem. Several also pointed out that this breed often goes through a period of growing pains, which can manifest in limps, and which will pass over time. I tried to bring my research to the vet’s attention, and she was wildly defensive. After some ridiculously dramatic back and forth, she suggested I find another vet, and made it clear that she was utterly disinterested in even considering the output of my research.

The happy ending of THAT story is that Bella’s limp has completely subsided. She developed a limp again after some rough play about a year or so after that vet’s diagnosis, after which I started giving her glucosamine supplements with her morning meal. Since those supplements began… no sign of any limp whatsoever.

I wonder what all of this means for the notion of subject matter expertise generally. As information becomes so widely searchable, and as trust models develop to help us sift through the noise and focus on information resources that are reasonably reliable, the value of storing a lot of information in your head seems to me to be radically diminished. Instead, there seems to be a marked shift underway, where the most valuable skill, by orders of magnitude, is the ability to ask the right questions, and the ability to organize the results of queries drawn from vast oceans of information into comprehensible meaningful answers. Thinking a lot about this, lately…