I have a friend with Crohn's disease. After 10 years on medication he injected himself with hookworm. He has now been medicine free for over a year with fewer symptoms than he had before.

Have you stuck with one GP or GI doc? Have you jumped around a lot? It takes time to build the relationship you are talking about. You can't ask for a "partnership" and then dismiss the other side ("priesthood").

I have a pretty dense medical knowledge compared to the average person. My mother had a lot of medical issues that I studied in detail. I have several of my own that I have also studied at great length, and I used to be an EMT. Waiting around and going through a tedious process for a new doctor to "catch up" with you is frustrating.

A lot of people aren't like this, though. I have a friend who, after weeks of not feeling well, had, at one time, read pages and pages of research on a particular disease and had convinced herself that this was the thing she had, this was why she was sick, and this was what she needed treatment for. What she failed to neglect was the title of the paper -- she had diagnosed herself with kennel cough.

As much valuable information as there is available on the internet, I also feel like the internet breeds hypochondriacs like nobody's business.

So I don't really think we need a change in the way healthcare is delivered, exactly. I think what we need is more education for would-be doctors about how to better engage and involve a patient in their own care and how to talk to a patient sincerely about their condition and evaluate the people who just googled something vs. the ones who genuinely know what they're talking about, and then how to work with the latter.

Good doctors will do this naturally, but a lot of doctors will take the attitude that they are the doctor, they know best because they have been to medical school. They may well have a better overall understanding of things, which can very well be extremely important when looking at how diseases and medications interact in conjunction with and affect one another. However, there simply isn't enough time for them to become experts on everything. There should be more emphasis on this fact and more instruction on how to work with the patients to make them the experts so that they can be more involved in their care.

I feel like I'm not making my point well, but this is starting to ramble a bit, so hopefully that makes sense.

This being said, unfortunately, for every awesome, smart and knowledgable person, there are tens and hundreds of people researching their cough on the internet and wasting everybody's time.

That being said, yes, the system could certainly be improved in most countries. A hard part is managing responsibilities. The doctor you go to has the responsibility of giving you sound advice to the best of his (and hopefully the scientific community's) knowledge.

If he did not follow the methods laid out by standard care, he would not be doing that. He would be irresponsible. Of course, there are always things that are on the fringe but would be beneficial, but then again, who knows, he might just kill a group of people down the road because he gave a fringe treatment to the wrong crowd.

Now to the point you rose for your own situation: it seems that your GP seems to be making it fairly simple for you (in a good way). Or was that a hypothetical scenario with the quick rubber stamp and so on?