I was incredibly sick for years, couldn’t get my doctor to help me, all he wanted to do was prescribe me medicine for depression though I wasn’t depressed at all. I said “screw it” and went out and learned how to heal the human body and have never looked back. And he never spent more than 10 minutes with me.
Then next time you are seriously injured or are having severe chest pain, why don't you call a faith healer or a massage therapist?
Oh puleeeeeze. Just because most doctors you consulted were incompetent, which suggests possible incompetence on your part in finding a good doctor, does not mean most doctors are incompetent.
Really good doctors are almost as rare as hen's teeth.
I know this because I've had to diagnose my own thyroiditis and pernicious anemia. Even when one PA test came back positive and the lab analysis indicted an 85% chance of PA, not one doc said boo turkey, and I went to a bunch with all of my many test results trying to get some help. I finally asked for a different PA test, that when it came back positive, indicated a %100 chance of PA. Then I finally got some acknowledgment. And folks, PA is not a rare disease.
Ditto with thyroiditis: I had to ask for the tests I wanted.
So during the multiple years this was all happening, I was slowly dieing, since PA is a fatal disease. And I spent all of my waining energy reading medical papers and medical texts, trying to do for myself what none of my doctors could do for me. I ended up knowing far more than most doctors about my conditions and many others I studied while working on a differential diagnosis.
I've got one really great doc that has helped me do some of these things and prescribe me the tests and medications I need, and even figured out some things I didn't, including when the thyroiditis tipped into overt hypothyroidism. But guess what? This doc doesn't accept insurance! Cash on the barrel-head! He's totally opted out of the insurance game so he can spend the amount of time necessary to figure out what is wrong, and prescribe treatments he feels are appropriate.
Along this path of illness, I came to feel that my survival was an intelligence test. I urge each and every one of you to take the medical well-being of you and your loved ones into your own hands, because almost no one in the medical profession really cares about you. They are mostly just clocking hours. Really, your mechanic and computer guy probably care more about the outcomes of their ministrations than does your doctor, because they have to survive based on the reputation of their work quality.
And it's only going to get worse with socialized medicine. Medicine will be such a cookbook affair, that there will be no discretion for a doctor that might care to try to figure out what is wrong with you. You'll be denied the tests you'll need for diagnosis, and then if you do miraculously mange to obtain a correct diagnosis, you'll receive the cheapest medications in lieu of the most effective medications.
BTW, I live in the Denver-metro area, so this is not one of those total backwoods rural situations, though I have developed a theory that a plot of the density of good doctors will highly correlate with a plot of the density of really good Italian restaurants. (Oh, and I don't think there is a single really good Italian restaurant in Colorado.)