If you think a doctor is wrong, they very well might be, particularly if you have already done your homework. This is not the old days, where medical knowledge is exclusively available to doctors. In fact, it is a huge risk to go in unprepared and ignorant of the possibilities, because misdiagnoses are not uncommon if critical symptoms get overlooked due to the patient not presenting them.
Ask yourself not how many doctors graduated with honors. Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
id probably still have to take his word over yours. and didnt these same doctors discover ADHD in the first place? at once theyre reliable and "dangerously bad"
My child was the same way due to a wheat allergy (U.S. wheat is heavier than European wheat, and the flour comes out differently. It's actually tougher to digest for many).
As for letting the doctor tell you... The last few decades, I find I've been making the diagnosis first. Chronic fatigue, adult chicken pox, whooping cough... In each case, the medical history I gave was a reasonable path for ordering tests to get the correct diagnosis, but in each case the doctors missed it.
The whooping cough one was particularly annoying. I had traveled to Amsterdam, which had an outbreak a couple of years ago. I told the doctors this, and they still diagnosed me as having an ordinary sinus infection and gave me the wrong antibiotics. My wife looked up the medical alerts in Amsterdam, I messaged the doctor asking for the correct antibiotics (just in time).
Doctors in the U.S. follow protocols. When they don't they have to file extra paperwork. The entire system is designed to punish deviation from protocol, and the protocols don't get adjusted based on evidence or circumstance. They're handed down from a committee that the insurance companies take as law. Insurance companies in particular are geared to denying payment for deviation from protocol without prior approval. So doctors adjust their behavior to go with the flow... unless you find a great doctor, who knows better.
These days, you really do need to take your health in your own hands. Doctors become a path to confirmation and treatment, at least on the illness side of things. Injury tends to be a little more cut-and-dried, but even there you have to find the right experts. For example for sports injuries, you likely want doctors that see many patients that play that particular sport because they have experience with how things can go wrong.
Sorry for the rant. I've just seen the need for shopping a lot more in recent years.
Also, a good doctor won’t take issue with this, so long as you don’t insist that your 5 minutes on WebMD is right and they’re wrong.
Analogy: If someone at work says they can’t log in, and also that their already logged in password queries don’t work, it could mean that the login service is down and the database is down. It could also mean that AWS is down, and rebooting those other services isn’t going to fix the common root cause.
If you trust a general doctor’s read of you in 11 minutes a year more than your own, it’s time to look within way more often.
Double-check yourself with your practitioner, but don’t sleep at the wheel.
Because it is YOU at the wheel - regardless what anyone wants!
