And in the days before the internet, they likely had a bookshelf full of reference manuals.
True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten) programming test.
And just as often they don’t. I went to the ER for a seizure, and basically after paying $5,000 the advice I got was “well that drug has seizures as a side effect, so stopping take it and find a new one.” Absolutely no investigation in to why this happened, if there’s a class of drugs I should avoid, nothing.
The business world has a jargon term, "solutions provider". The idea is that they strive to not just provide you a tool, but to fully solve your problem, to make it entirely go away. It's often just a buzzword, but like most buzzwords, there's a kernel of useful truth in the middle of it.
The medical industry is not a solutions provider. You should view them as a useful tool, but one that still leaves you with the responsibility to utilize the useful tool to solve your problems.
I am not making a normative claim here; I'm making a descriptive one. The medical system is an incredible toolset, but you need to be ready to assemble it into a solution. Maybe it should be a solutions provider. Maybe it's really discriminatory against the people who won't or can't operate this way. No argument. But it observably isn't a solutions provider today, whatever "should" be.
In this particular case, if you care you should have scheduled a followup with a different doctor. ER doctors don't do that sort of analysis.
Well I can’t find any information on the general internet about this, beyond what the doctor said. One would most likely have to synthesize several different areas of knowledge to come up with a plausible hypothesis.
True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten) programming test.