Doctors used to be viewed with (justified) suspicion. That suspicion is mostly still justified, but doctors are riding the coattails of several significant medical inventions in the last 100 years, especially antibiotics. This gives them a lot of credibility (justified or not), and the political consequences of this are not ideal. Hopefully this will eventually return to equilibrium and people will stop treating doctors like they're a couple stddev smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are.