also, doctors in recent decades have been horrendously overworked, particularly with regard to pressure to see many more patients daily than was the norm a generation ago. Less time with patients = less chance for listening to background and contextual information that may be useful in evaluation.

That's true, social dynamics changed dramatically. More stress, less stable human relationships, more pollution, less activity .. what was working fine before probably need a revamp. Either that or we go back to slower and more local lifestyles (not bad in my book)

Perhaps so, but do we have any evidence that the frequency of diagnostic errors has increased?

No clue and it's entirely possible diagnostics have improved in some ways, in part due to improvements in testing and in part due to patients being better educated.

But I'm old-ish and I remember when it was pretty normal for Mom to show up with all three kids and a couple of their cousins and get them all treated at the same time. In contrast, in recent years, I routinely hear that people in the family pass the same crud around repeatedly because they get treated as individuals and it leads to recurrent or chronic issues. I've also dealt enough with chronic health stuff that I'm quite confident that when doctors decide "This is your normal. Just get used to it." it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

From what I gather, obesity and chronic health issues are vastly more common than they used to be. To my mind, that's probably evidence that something has gone very wrong with our health mental models/practices overall and the change in how we interact with physicians is probably just one grain of sand in a beach of changes. (However, it will also be confounded by medical advances leading to people malingering when, historically, they would have simply died. We often can't cure them, but we can keep them alive longer than we used to.)

But I'm sure that's a case of "Other people won't necessarily see what I see and if they don't, there will be no winning them over." (shrug)

"From what I gather, obesity and chronic health issues are vastly more common than they used to be."

Obesity, perhaps, but chronic health issues? Not really - and a tremendous number of those went untreated. A huge number of people in the past lived with perpetual pain and disabilities.

Historically, we didn't have the resources to "carry" a lot of disabled people. You had to pull your own weight in some way.

Because I'm disabled and the internet is a thing, I'm very aware of the existence of people on disability, on multiple meds and not doing much with their lives. Historically, we simply didn't have the resources to support such people.

I'm thinking of those folks -- not simply people living with pain and limitations, but people who historically would have simply died because if it was going to kill you to keep on keeping on, then you were going to die because disability payments, etc, simply did not exist like they do today.