What is more likely: that doctors are slackers that have no idea what they are doing, or that their education path prioritized doing things over explaining anatomy to laymen.
In nearly all cases this works out pretty well, most people will have some improvement when the right script is applied, and doctors are pretty good at mapping problems to scripts.
But for edge cases, that approach is not going to work. Human propensities to slack notwithstanding, the business model discourages doctors from spending all day debugging one patient that isn’t responsive to their scripts.
We do this in software, too. “Really rare race condition, one in a million chance, not going to rathole, deprioritized.”
For reasonably smart, reasonably disciplined people, going to med school and getting licensed is not some transformative experience that forces them all to become brilliant diagnosticians and healers. It's just a bit of a long grind to score what's hoped to be a well-paying and traditionally respected job.
And then once you finish that grind and have the job, you still need to balance it with a regular old life of resposinilities and crises and kids and vacations; and in fact, because of the grind many people necessarily shift their personal and mental focus towards those other things.
Meanwhile, the job sucks in a lot of ways and doesn't deliver on the childhood fantasies of what it must be like. Colleages and administrators make it miserable quite often, and patiets sure do too.
The upshot is that no: many doctors are not all that brilliant and attentive to start with, and many who may sometimes be so are slackers. Shortcuts win, knowledge outside routine/common stuff fades, etc
Just like all jobs.
It's great when you can find the diamond in the rough for your own care, but don't assume they're all diamonds just because they went to med school for a while.
I tried to imagine what questions they might ask, I looked over and the first question on her sheet was “why do you want to be a doctor.
This is not an intellectual interview, it’s a class and commitment signaling exercise.
Then there are the 5% of problems that could be solved with 20% effort, but there is enough money in it to convince the patient to pay for more attention even if they don't need it.
Let's hope that 80% of doctors don't gravitate to the 1% of patients that can afford to pay for exclusivity.
People with enough money to see 10 different specialists in search of a satisfying answer are probably already moving outside of the treadmill medicine realm.