M.Ds know things, that's the point! Have we been trained for scientific thinking? Absolutely, totally not. Test your mother on basic statistics and scientific reasoning, and you will quickly see the limits. This has absolutely nothing to do with being a decent doctor or not. Now, you are going to tell me she can read the scientific literature and make sense of it? Medicine is caring for patients, meaning applying knowledge. Knowledge applied in the clinics is mostly passed through practical training from generation to generation. Arguably, the decisive factor of change in medicine has up to now always been technology: a stent in an artery, ether anesthesia, organ transplant, etc. A certain base of irrefutable knowledge is present, of course, but it is proportionally small compared to the amount of downright false information we get from clinical trials.

We could debate for hours on that subject, but I dare say that someone who believes that most M.Ds can do real science is very wrong. Statistics done by M.Ds is akin to a junkie cooking meth. He knows how to make it, but has no idea why sometimes it goes wrong. Moreover, you drastically underestimate the dishonesty of the "experts" you are citing.