Plywood sawdust as mulch?

[krw]

SO you think they're taught that ear infections don't cause inflammation? That they're taught to prescribe antibiotics for a sprained ankle? With the concern with overuse of antibiotics, I highly doubt it.

Time. The "script" is correct 99% of the time. Like it or not, much medicine is an assembly line. Specialists usually have time (and resources) to isolate things a little more but ,yes, the initial diagnosis has to be right to find the right specialist. Or (as I found) that one specialist assumes/rejects symptoms that aren't consistent with their specialty. My cardiologist missed a, related but not immediately explicable, neurological issue.

No, doctors aren't perfect (they're only licensed to _practice_)

Fraud, incompetence, and malpractice have nothing to do with your original subject.

BTW, with the exception of one PCP, all of my doctors have been top notch. I have a dozen, or more, appointments with five or six specialists every year. I just picked up two more for another dozen visits but I hope it's temporary. While I've found almost universal competence in physicians, I've found the opposite with the administrators. They're almost wholly incompetent.

[John Grossbohlin]

From a Doctor/Patient standpoint you apparently had what you consider to be good experiences. That is good.

From my health insurance quality, provider credentialing, accreditation and regulatory compliance experience, and personal relationships with providers outside of a Doctor/Patient relationship, I have a different world view of what is going on. Having a girlfriend who has a background as a professor/department chair/dean in health sciences adds to it. I carry my professional and personal baggage with me in my personal Doctor/Patient experiences and quite frankly, it serves me well as I can have good conversations and I can tell when there is something wrong on the business side. I'm also very leery of what goes in "health records" due to the pay for service model combined with varying amounts of fraud, waste and abuse as they distort the true picture of someone's health for the sake of revenue.

What Adam Smith wrote nearly 250 years ago still holds today... even in medicine: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."