I think the commenters point was not about people reading articles on the internet and feeling that they've got a better understanding than doctors. It's about medical professionals thinking that they are infallible.
So despite 12 years of elite education, doctors still prescribe Tylenol, even though current science says it basically does nothing except screw with your liver.
Chiropractic is bunk. Audiology is a tool of price gouging hearing aid cartels. Every doctor that played along with the Sackler playbook directly perpetuated the opioid crisis. Optometrists are a front for cartels of glasses and lens manufacturers.
Much of what is qualified as medicine is exploitative corporate fuckery.
Toxic incentives abound, but god forbid we question the integrity of the system.
There's a lot wrong with the institutional role of "doctor" in the US. Part of it is that there aren't enough of them. Part is that the institution is granted a veneer of authority over things it has no claim to (see: psychology.) Part is corporate pharmaceutical corruption and bad incentives.
There are many situations where self directed research is going to be much better than what you'll get from a brief visit with an overworked, irritated, often arrogant and egotistical doctor without intimate knowledge of your unique medical situation. It's infuriating to get those half-assed "best guess" diagnoses or prescriptions.
I would trust an earnest high schooler with Google over a doctor from, say, 1920, with almost any medical situation except actual surgery, and maybe not then. I trust my own understanding of scientific evidence and research over doctors from 1970 or maybe even later.
How much time is needed by modern, educated doctors to exceed the quality of advice gained by self directed, appropriately conducted research, using the best of what the internet has to offer?
Obviously the doctor's advice will exceed what the patient can accomplish on their own, given sufficient time. Absent sufficient time, a person spending 4 weeks researching online could, and probably frequently does, exceed the domain specific knowledge and assessment by a doctor making a 5 minute "best effort. "
It shouldn't be combative, and doctors should be willing to investigate information brought by patients from legitimate resources. The gap between "civilian" and doctors available information and education is not nearly as great as it once was.
Dismissing the situation as "don't believe what you read on the internet" is a shallow and ignorant stance. We have the sum total of human knowledge available to us via Wikipedia, specialist sites, forums, scihub,arxiv, and so on. Everything, including the good stuff, is online.
People can and do use rational, scientific thinking to engage with that information, and in that situation, the doctor's 12 years of education only means something if they can spend an appropriate amount of time acquiring evidence and information from the patient. There's not enough of them, so unless a situation is serious and demands immediate attention, doctors often won't be able to provide sufficient time to make their expertise relevant.
I don't dispute the problems with medicine you listed, although there are also good doctors out there, if you can find them. And sure, if you spend enough time researching something and can filter the facts from the misinformation on the internet then you might be able to do a better job than a doctor that spends less than an hour. But how much of the general population will put in that effort versus trusting the first thing that comes up in a Google search?
Now if you do your own research, and use that to improve your interaction with your doctor that is good. But replacing medical professionals with google searches can potentially be dangerous, at least for some conditions.
Absolutely, the biggest pitfall with self research is not knowing what set of unknowns you have to fill in the blanks for. The value of education is the deep context in which any particular fact will fit, so it takes a lot of effort to fill in a rational approximation of what a doctor can diagnose. 1 hour of a doctor's time could be worth months of effort on your own.
Someone with MS might have their doctor recommend against being vaccinated. Someone else with MS might be fine, but their two stories could lead people to radically different conclusions, when it's the unique particulars that validate the judgment of the doctors in question.
We need a better culture of scientific discourse in public, allowing for nuanced and depth without the pitfalls of fallacious thinking.
Hyperpartisan and sensational media amplify the feedback loop in ragebait meme propagation. Maybe there's a mathematical tool or theory in graphs or networking that could help identify and shut down the spread of argument and combative discourse - not particular ideas, but particular forms. Seemingly opposite facts and opinions can be true in parallel and it's dangerous to attempt to either validate or censor one side or the other.
The latest crusade on misinformation and "anti vax" views is an example of how spectacularly flawed tools of censorship and rightthink can be.
