Wait, I can hear my Chief Grammar Editor screaming “NOOOOOOO” it is supposed to be effect. Stick with me….
You wake up one morning with a sore knee. A shooting painful, throbbing awful kind of ache that flashes mortality across your brain even before you have had your first cup of coffee. A sufficient enough pain that you use your coffee to wash down the multiple Advil. And then you wait, hoping the pain will go away. The ache subsides, but the deep pain does not. Sufficiently painful that next step is to schedule the doctor’s appointment. Given the location of the pain, you go straight to the orthopedist given the proximity of the pain rather than your general doc-in-the-box down the street. Not wasting time messing around with this amount of pain.
After the nurse takes your symptoms, pokes and prods a bit, and then leaves for an hour; in pops the doctor who introduces themselves and then tells you that based upon your symptoms, that he needs to schedule you for an amputation and he can fit you in tomorrow. WHAT!!? “I am the best amputation specialist in the country, don’t worry. You will be fitted with a great prosthetic and you will only occasionally have phantom pain.”
Hmmm. Can we second opinion? What if the second one said that you need the latest drug protocol to rebuild cartilage. He is the leading expert in the country and is one of the owners of the drug company. Only run you $25,000 per pill for a 3 month treatment course.
And so on and so on…. You probably would pop on to the internet and see what other people had done to fix their knee pain and see if you could diagnose it for yourself.
Or like most people these days, before you scheduled the first appointment, you would have gone online and searched for your symptoms to find out what might be causing your pain. Could it because you were overdoing last night dancing? Tripped and fell down? Could it be the amount of training that you have been doing lately? The good news is that you will find lots of opinions. Bad news is that you will find lots and lots of opinions, misinformation, and noise. Just useless noise.
What is the point of the above story? The doctors did not help you diagnose the underlying problem. They just went from painful symptoms straight to treatment option. The peer information online had too much information that confused the symptoms and the possible underlying problems making it impossible to diagnose which symptoms were really directly caused by which problem.
Welcome to the world of being a buyer in your market. Answer a simple question, what problem do you solve and for whom? Hints: Continue reading “Cause and Affect” »
