If you're a woman in the US, doctors will sooner call your issues anxiety and throw Xanax at you than to try to help you figure out the causes. Sometimes they'll even get mad at you if you don't want to take Xanax and suggest you're mentally unfit.
I’m not a woman and it wasn’t Xanax, but Ativan was a miracle drug that cured many physical symptoms for me. Doctors follow an algorithm where they look for common stuff first (“when you hear hoof beats…”), and anxiety is very common; I believe more so amongst women.
My wife is currently dealing with a kidney stone that is filling her entire kidney. Major surgery incoming. She started having them check it a year ago.
When advocating for herself, the male doctors either a) seemed to believe she was making it up and attributed it literally to her monthly cycle, or b) suggested it was anxiety.
I'm sort of in the camp that doctors absolutely poopoo women's problems.
It happens for men, too. Anyone with problems that don't produce obviously incorrect lab values or gross physical symptoms, unless it's in the top 10 or 20 most common illnesses, good luck with that. Even if your lab values are off, but "not enough", getting anyone to do something about them is heroic effort, and when you're already ill, it's a farce.
The alternative is to not visit a doctor of any sort. You might take that further and not visit a mechanic. Medical practitioners are not perfect. I trust they are doing their job and they can get it wrong. Medicine is not easy. People have to advocate for themselves if they don't think the doctor got it right.
Well that's the point of DIY medicine, empowering people like yourself to make your own PCP. Of course you trust it more than the PCP from that guy in Midtown.
Do most people feel this way about formalized medical practitioners today?