At some point I had the harebrained idea of writing a LW sequence on health, despite lacking all formal qualifications for doing so, because I've been confused about / disappointed with most of my experiences at doctors' offices throughout my life. Eventually I figured I won't understand why until I do a deep dive into the topic myself.

Questions I'd like to help (myself and others) answer include "how can I think about this potential illness I have" or "how could I tell whether I have a sleep problem when I'm unconscious while asleep" or "how good is healthcare, how do the incentives work, in which situations are doctors likely to give good / poor advice", etc.

By now I have a huge bunch of disorganized notes, but no drafts or essays written up; maybe I'll manage to write one this week, but most likely not.

Rough intended outline:

• Preamble: What does it mean to take care of your health? And then, how to actually act on health concerns (wrt motivation etc.)?
• Epistemics: Thinking about health is hard and involves a lot of biases. Disambiguating disease (-> Scott's LW essay on Diseased Thinking). Epistemic learned helplessness. How to think about and compare health risks. Etc.
• How good is Healthcare? Civilizational inadequacy and Gell-Mann Amnesia. Why are real doctors not Detectives of Illnesses à la Dr. House? Principal-agent problems. Which concerns by patients are not taken seriously? How does the healthcare system deal with chronic illnesses? Covid Policy. Zvi's FDA Delenda Est stuff. Etc. pp.
• Unknown Unknowns: If you've always been healthy / ill, how would you even know? Society-wide failings, blind spots, and delusions (e.g. the manioc story from The Secret Of Our Success). Etc.
• Operating Conditions of the Human Body (a particularly Gears-y essay): What temperature, humidity, nutrients, noise levels, oxygen levels, CO2 levels, etc. etc. does a human body need to thrive? How can you tell if something is off here? (-> e.g. buy a CO2 sensor, a thermometer, etc.)
• A Rough Overview of Physiology: [Whatever I as a layperson can cobble together to provide very-rough-but-not-misleadingly-incorrect summaries of all bodily systems (like the gastrointestinal system). And how and to which extent a layperson can roughly tell whether the system is healthy.]
• Personal Idiosyncrasies: In a world of ~8 billion people, you're probably not a unique snowflake with unique health issues... unless maybe everyone is one? On stuff like hereditary disease, birth defects, but also the notions of e.g. Typical Mind Fallacy and Universal Human Experiences mentioned frequently on SSC (e.g. aphantasia, tinnitus, visual snow), etc.
• Things That (Might) (Actually) Help: Synthesizing hopefully-actually-useful-advice from the above essays. I expect this to result in advice like "buy an ergonomic chair", not "here's a magical way to solve all your health issues forever".
• [Plus a few other miscellaneous essays.]

Does that sound interesting / useful / valuable?

Regarding concrete blockers for this project (besides procrastination, of course):

• I'm interested in pointers to resources on these topics (like physiology or "how does the healthcare system work") which are considered to be very accurate. E.g. "X is the authoritative textbook on Intro to Physiology" or something.
• Are you aware of any great resources (search engines, websites, etc.) for asking general health questions? Resources used by professionals would be fine, too, but I suspect those would be paywalled.
• Once I have a draft to show, I could use feedback from beta readers with backgrounds in healthcare or medicine. For this I'll also request assistance from the LW feedback service.