I think it's easy to come up with such delineation after the fact, but OP was looking for a more comforting answer. By the sound of it, that was the reason they didn't like the initial diagnosis. It wasn't about facts not adding up.

The reality is that modern medicine is absolutely amazing, but there are also many interventions backed by shoddy science or no science at all. Sometimes, "doing your own research" exposes such lapses. Sometimes, it sends you off the deep end and you end up chasing ghosts. To allow the former, you need to tolerate some of the latter.

And yeah, sometimes the shoddy science involves interventions so basic and so common that you'd think they're sorted out. Consider that Europe and the US take wildly divergent views on topics such as wisdom teeth, colonoscopies, or the value of flu vaccines.

"Science literacy" doesn't shield you from being wrong. Maybe it helps, but there's no shortage of Nobel laureates who believe in conspiracy theories or promote dubious medical treatments. Talking about "science literacy" is usually just how geeks convince themselves that their beliefs can't be wrong.

It’s funny how every generation of modern medicine acts like this time they know 100% what the correct answers are while we all scoff at how wrong they got it just a few decades ago.

Every generation the advice on which way to put your kid to sleep flip flops.

It would be shamefully foolish to disregard all the incredible advances and technologies that modern medicine offers. It would be equally shamefully foolish to think it’s not still deeply flawed.

This is true across more domains than medicine - especially in IT, the absolute assurance that those idiots 5 years ago were brain dead but now we’ve solved all the things.

It strikes me as unfortunate that for a lot of things like home repairs/renovations its pretty normal to get 3+ different opinions/bids.. but for our health its usually your regular doctor, and at most a 2nd opinion in some cases.

We'll make life changing decisions based on the opinion/advice of 1 individual, while shopping around on a home project or car repair that's +/- $5k.

It seems again like a combination of shortage of medical workers and the indirect nature of medical payment. If I knew up front that walking in and getting 3 medical opinions would cost me X, and I didn't need any pre-approval from insurance, or risk denials.. I'd just go do it more. But the system is so opaque that I don't know I can get those answers readily, or believe the numbers are real and won't result in random bills later.

Further, the next step after figuring out the cost of getting options would then e getting a quote for the actual resulting medical care recommends is opaque due to differing payment %s & co-pays by procedure, etc.

Something your comment overlooked is the overall availability and the required timeline for something health related is usually quite different than home maintenance or car troubles.

I had a really bad sprain about two years ago to the point where my partner had to help me on and off the toilet. Eventually I took off work, went to urgent care, and paid $200 for them to basically say "well it's not broken, we could do an MRI otherwise we don't know what you want us to do". Booking an appointment with a GP would have taken around a month. They won't be able to do anything long term but will recommend a physical therapist. All said and done it's probably a $5-10k ordeal and weeks until I could actually see any progress, plus work time missed. Big surprise, I didn't actually end up going to see a doctor. Recovery sucked and some movements still aren't quite right.

In an ideal world, what would you say should have happened?

Instead of being blown off and told "I don't know what you want us to do" after being triaged, some helpful direction on next steps I can take would have been nice. Something like "Yes, we can do an MRI but that'll be expensive. We can make an appointment for you for physical therapy. Also here's some minimal tips we have to make recovery a bit better." It's a sprain, I imagine that's pretty common, but most people don't know what to do. To be shuffled out as soon as possible seems pretty irresponsible to me.

My go-to question isn’t “should I do X” but more like “would you do X if this was you” - with good providers it gets closer to the heart of the matter.

> Further, the next step after figuring out the cost of getting options would then e getting a quote for the actual resulting medical care recommends is opaque due to differing payment %s & co-pays by procedure, etc.

There’s nothing more quintessentially American than “not knowing how much you are going to pay for something until you owe it.” You go for a hospital visit and nobody has even a remote, order-of-magnitude idea of what you are going to pay. But you have to sign a doc right away that says “you agree to pay whatever number we eventually come up with!” And then you slowly get dozens of bills from individual doctors and hospital workers over the next 4 months. It’s absurd.