| My wife has a few chronic illnesses so I've encountered more doctors than the average person. There are two primary types that account for all but one or 2 out of around 30 that we have seen in order to attempt to get my wife effective help. 1. The type that's too incompetent to diagnose anything more complicated than a cold or a broken bone. Usually they are general practitioners, sometimes they are specialists. 2. The type that might have been a productive person but they are too arrogant and/or lazy to diagnose anything but the most common things that pop up in their specialization. If its starting to look like its going to take any amount of effort at all to diagnose they'll throw their hands up and literally claim they don't know and its probably just something you'll have to live with. It would be foolish for a layperson to think they can train themselves to be a doctor using google and diagnose a wide range of medical conditions in a large group of random patients better than a doctor. Its not foolish at all to think that given you have all the time in the world since its your life, that you might be able to do some productive things and try to figure out what could theoretically be wrong with you so you can make a more educated guess about which specific specialist might be able to diagnose your condition or rule out one that you suspected you might have. 99% of doctors are going to make a basic effort and then pretend its just some unknown chronic thing you probably shouldn't worry about, even if you feel like you are dying on a daily basis. Or diagnose you for one of the common things that doesn't fit your symptoms, give you medicine that will either not help at all or actually exacerbate your condition, and then double down on the diagnosis. And its not just about finding the right type of specialist, you can go to two specialists within the same field and one can be completely worthless to you because they have no experience with your set of symptoms. I've gotten too many blank stares from doctors when asking them basic things that they should know to buy into the notion we seem to promote in the US that all of them are geniuses. FYI Not an anti-medicine, anti-vax conspiracy nut. I just went through a nightmarish ordeal for several years trying to get help for my wife. Her condition is a physical condition that's misdiagnosed 80% of the time as anxiety. Once you have anxiety listed on your medical record, good fucking luck getting any of these arrogant assholes to do their job. Once you do get a diagnosis, the results of treatment are pretty mixed, but mostly not amazing. Fortunately it doesn't significantly shorten a person's life, but it does make it difficult to live it. I've seen mildly famous and wealthy youtubers (famous for being sick youtubers, in some cases having the same condition as my wife) get teams of doctors working together hand in hand to figure out some rare set of conditions and make a person's life better. Most doctors I've encountered will figuratively tell you to go fuck yourself if you even want them to talk to another specialist. The closest I came to that was spending several thousand dollars sending her to the Mayo clinic. They rush you through a series of tests and then send you home without doing much of anything at all, hoping that you have a good team of doctors that can pick up where they left off. If you don't (and you won't) its a massive waste of time and money. |
