How Collapsing Social Infrastructure Led to Everyone Becoming an Internet Medical Expert

[Trillo]

56. I'd love to write a long reply to you, shortish will have to do.

I was the opposite growing up, upper middle class family, healthcare professionals (though no physicians), and there was never a shortage of medical care when I needed it. Unfortunately, I learned that most of the doctors I saw were, for whatever reason, incompetent, or corrupt. They were unable to diagnose a very simple milk allergy. I remember reading in newspapers as a kid and teenager that some folks had food allergies to citrus fruits, or milk, or something else, and I remember thinking, "Sure am glad I don't have that." Once I became an adult, skin tests were done and I found out a lot more about why I always felt rotten, I had a lot of food allergies. However, that wasn't the end of it. It was a pre-Internet era, at least it hadn't yet been adopted by most folks, and I got milk intolerance confused with milk allergy. I wanted to be a vegetarian, so went to an MD at a world-renown medical clinic of over 300 doctors, and after filling out the form and duly noting my milk allergy, had this MD tell me that a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet was in the opinion of him and his colleagues, a very good diet, and I'd do well on it (lacto-ovo diet includes milk and cheese and butter). So, I spent the next 5 years eating cheese as a protein source, which I never could assimilate, and gained a lot of weight, an unhealthy amount, even though I avoided liquid milk. I eventually figured it out just a few years ago, changed my diet, lost a lot of weight, and very much so, stay away from doctors as much as possible.

I do not understand how some highly educated and highly paid physicians can be so incompetent. There is something seriously wrong with the system. My presumption is that the incompetence is less about education and more about pecking order and average citizens being "lab rats" of a sick, corporatist system to whom average citizens are little more than chattel. That makes more sense to me than presuming some doctors are stupid and ignorant. Those "incompetent" doctors are more likely intentionally harmful.

Doctors, as "authority figures", are a critical part of the Police State in which we find ourselves, and for some-to-many doctors the health of their patients is of little-to-no concern.