I'm working on a metaphor:
Being a doctor today is like being asked to repair a giant sawmill, and they hand you a pile of manuals, but each one was written by a different person who only ever looked at a small part of a sawmill, and you ask for some tools and they hand you a jeweller's screwdriver and a hammer, and then they tell you that you can't turn off the sawmill let alone take it apart, they're still using it!
I'm impressed any medicine works at all, is what I'm saying
@jamey Medicine increasingly sounds very much like the industrial model. You have literally described most places I've worked, in terms of the compartmentalization of skillsets, technologies, tools and terminologies.
Ironic maybe, but in technical fields we're increasingly *post*industrial: there is no documentation, there are no manuals. Just 30 minute videos to like and subscribe and forum narratives threaded across defunct sites.
@Momentrabbit This is true. I think where medicine (and biology, physics, etc) is different from, say, engineering, is that in engineering just because nobody documented it, that doesn't necessarily mean nobody understands it. In science there are facts that nobody in the world has stumbled upon yet; in engineering, there may be emergent behaviors or interactions with unknown science but usually somebody understood it sometime. So that's another limitation of my metaphor.