Originally Posted By: tropic
I dunno, but Rofl's posts don't bug me the way they do some members. He's got some interesting views .....
I will be posting less.
It comes from being a good diagnostician.
You need to look at the car as a series of systems, and understand how the systems work together to correctly translate symptoms observed into a correct diagnosis.
Otherwise you wind up being a serial parts replacer who blunders around replacing things until something good happens.
Once you learn that skill, it works on nearly everything.
For example, back a few years ago my physician gave me three prescriptions to deal with high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Within a month my legs started aching and then they started turning purple.
I went back to her and told her some medication she gave me must be causing problem. Nope, it was "venous insufficiency".
After six months of trying to deal with "venous insufficiency" through exercise, I went to a nearby medical school and sat down in the library with the names of the pills she prescribed.
It turned out that one of them, a beta blocker, created a problem called "Raynard's Syndrome" which overlapped the symptoms of "venous insufficiency" about 90%. It was a rare side effect but it was fully documented in the literature.
So I stopped taking the beta blocker. And my legs started getting better. So I went back to the physician and explained what I found and had done. And she argued with me.
So I fired her.
When you get some information, and this works in every discipline and situation, you need to think outside the box and put it in context.
Otherwise you will wind up making mistakes like my doctor, or replacing the wrong parts, or making war to find Weapons of Mass Destruction where there are none, or deciding Ashland Refining could not possibly be wrong.
Linear thinking leads to nothing but trouble.
Jumping to conclusions leads to nothing but trouble.
"Knowing" the answer before the data arrives leads to nothing but trouble.
Those who think linearly and jump to conclusions, be they motor oil pundits or physicians, really get angry at people who don't and point out what they are doing.
Demanding hard data and incontrovertible proof drives them right up the wall.
.
I dunno, but Rofl's posts don't bug me the way they do some members. He's got some interesting views .....
I will be posting less.
It comes from being a good diagnostician.
You need to look at the car as a series of systems, and understand how the systems work together to correctly translate symptoms observed into a correct diagnosis.
Otherwise you wind up being a serial parts replacer who blunders around replacing things until something good happens.
Once you learn that skill, it works on nearly everything.
For example, back a few years ago my physician gave me three prescriptions to deal with high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Within a month my legs started aching and then they started turning purple.
I went back to her and told her some medication she gave me must be causing problem. Nope, it was "venous insufficiency".
After six months of trying to deal with "venous insufficiency" through exercise, I went to a nearby medical school and sat down in the library with the names of the pills she prescribed.
It turned out that one of them, a beta blocker, created a problem called "Raynard's Syndrome" which overlapped the symptoms of "venous insufficiency" about 90%. It was a rare side effect but it was fully documented in the literature.
So I stopped taking the beta blocker. And my legs started getting better. So I went back to the physician and explained what I found and had done. And she argued with me.
So I fired her.
When you get some information, and this works in every discipline and situation, you need to think outside the box and put it in context.
Otherwise you will wind up making mistakes like my doctor, or replacing the wrong parts, or making war to find Weapons of Mass Destruction where there are none, or deciding Ashland Refining could not possibly be wrong.
Linear thinking leads to nothing but trouble.
Jumping to conclusions leads to nothing but trouble.
"Knowing" the answer before the data arrives leads to nothing but trouble.
Those who think linearly and jump to conclusions, be they motor oil pundits or physicians, really get angry at people who don't and point out what they are doing.
Demanding hard data and incontrovertible proof drives them right up the wall.
.
