To become a physician one must go to four years of undergraduate college majoring in pre-med, four years of medical school, two years as an intern, and finally an undetermined number of years as a resident depending upon specialty choice. And speaking of specialties, doctors are becoming more and more specialized. Not only are there plastic surgeons, there are hand specialists, nose specialists, etc. There are gastrointerologists who are particular about which part of the intestinal system they treat. Does this make them infallable, even in their specialty? It does not. Will they say, "I'm stumped?". Very rarely will one admit to not being able to diagnose or treat a problem.
Perhaps by specializing in these particular body parts, they can be better at what they do, because they do not have to deal with so very much. Even so, my experience with doctors does not elicit trust. It seems that few of them go into medicine for the reasons that doctors used to. There was a time in history when doctoring was not profitable. People often bartered for medical care, and when they had nothing to barter, the doctor treated them, regardless. They even made house calls. Today it is an extremely lucrative career, and many go into the profession for that reason.
While in college, I visited a roommates ranch where we went horseback riding. My horse ran back to the barn and threw me. My collar bone was broken. We went to the hospital about twenty miles away. The doctor was two hours getting there (he was golfing), and after glancing at the x-rays did a terrible job of wrapping me in some sort of gauze brace for the two and a half hour ride back to school. I went to a specialist in town the next day who told me that it would leave a large knot but the only solution would be to rebreak it as it had begun to knit, then operate to set it which would leave a large scar. I opted for the knot.
Some forty years ago, I went to my obstetrician for a weekly visit in my ninth month. He told me that I wouldn't deliver for at least two weeks. I went into labor the next night with a baby that was posterior in the birth canal and a doctor that was deer hunting. The doctor he left in charge had several patients of his own in labor plus a couple more of my doctor's patients(maybe there was a full moon). My labor lasted nearly thirty hours, I dehydrated, and my dad had to grab a doctor out of the hall to get some help. He finally delivered the baby without a caesarean section, but we had to pay him as well as the other doctor.
My second child was an RH baby, and at that time there was no such thing as a bilirubin light. He had to have his blood exchanged. The hospital tried most of the day to reach the surgeon and finally did so after about five hours, when the bilirubin was dangerously high. An exchange of his blood was made, which is considered surgery, and my husband and I waited in the waiting room for over four hours. Finally, we asked why it was taking so long. He had finished after an hour, but had not bothered to let us know.
My dad had his first heart attack when he was in his early fifties. He had a stroke at age fifty-seven. The doctors only gave him a couple of years to live. My mother studied nutrition and therapy in books at the library and changed their lifestyle. He lived to seventy-four.
My son was a rough-stock rider in rodeo. He got hung up on a horse and tore his anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. The surgeon supposedly repaired it. That is what we were charged for. Many years later, a doctor checked his knee and told him that there was no ACL; it had been completely removed. The muscles had built up around the knee. That is why he could walk on it at all.
There were other instances through the years of doctors making errors in judgement and showing little concern for us as individuals (some were downright rude), but there have been a few good ones as well. Unfortunately the good experiences have been fewer than the bad.
I truly believe that my father in law would have lived many more years than he did had the doctor not done a biopsy on a small spot on his lung then tried three different kinds of chemotherapy on him. He died six months after diagnosis. Prior to his "diagnosis" he was walking three miles every day and only had a cough.
With the exception of broken bones, cataract surgery, severe asthma attacks of children and grandchildren - that sort of thing, I avoid doctors and do all I can with homeopathy. Fortunately this has been a good choice for my family, so far. I do not particularly trust doctors, and we rarely have had to use them, thankfully.