Not trying to discredit medical professionals or the amount of work they put in. I'm sure the majority are intelligent, conscientious and good at their jobs.
I'm sure half of them are below average
Unfortunately I have also encountered an about equal number of medical professionals who have been grossly incompetent.
What I consider to have been by far the greatest mistake that I have made in my life, a mistake which had irremediable consequences, was to have excessive faith in the competence of some well-paid medical professionals.
Both my parents had the bad luck of being misdiagnosed the first time when they had some medical problems (for completely unrelated causes). In both cases the correct diagnostic was discovered by other medical doctors, but only after many months, when their conditions had become much worse.
Because of the delayed diagnostics, both their lives were shortened by maybe 4 to 5 years.
After the correct diagnostics, I have read the appropriate medical textbooks and I have discovered that in both cases my parents had presented the typical ensemble of symptoms described in the textbooks, they were not some weird cases, easily misdiagnosed.
For the correct diagnostics, the first doctors should have recognized the textbook symptoms and they should have sent them to the appropriate investigations that were necessary to confirm their maladies.
Instead of that, they have chosen the lazy way of saying that they do not need any further investigations because old people complain all the time for various minor problems and they have prescribed them some useless treatments.
If I would have been more skeptical about medical fallibility, I should have sought a second opinion since the beginning, but unfortunately I did not.
Literally the top of the 'treatment' section on WebMD:
> Managing type 2 diabetes includes a mix of lifestyle changes and medication. Lifestyle changes: You may be able to reach your target blood sugar levels with diet and exercise alone.
And the section on preventing type 2:
> Adopting a healthy lifestyle can help you lower your risk of diabetes.
> Lose weight. Dropping just 7% to 10% of your weight can cut your risk of type 2 diabetes in half.
> Get active. Thirty minutes of brisk walking a day will cut your risk by almost a third.
> Eat right. Avoid highly processed carbs, sugary drinks, and trans and saturated fats. Limit red and processed meats.
When he saw that I was losing weight and that my A1C was heading downward, he asked what I was doing. I told him about the carb restriction. He looked down, smiled, shook his head, and said nothing. That was the end of it.