The trouble with experts …

… ‘The Deep Places’ Review: Patient, Heal Thyself. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Within days of acquiring the dream house, Mr. Douthat awoke with a stiff neck. He found “a red swelling” six inches down from his left ear. “It’s just a boil,” said a doctor, his insouciant declaration the first of many diagnoses in which it was claimed that there was nothing physically wrong with him. Lyme—a debilitating bacterial disease acquired from deer-tick bites—was ruled out because many of his symptoms didn’t match a rigid checklist drawn up for the ailment by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This “diagnostic standardization,” Mr. Douthat writes, was “supposed to establish a consistent baseline for national case reporting, not rule out the possibility of atypical cases or constrain doctors from diagnosing them.” As a result of such inflexibility, he tells us, doctors miss “anywhere from a third to half of early Lyme cases.”