Is my attitude toward doctors justified?

[happiness]

I have a great deal of distrust of doctors in general. In my view, the government's strict control of the medical profession has resulted in a generation of physicians who are unskilled and second-handed, their attitudes about medicine revolving around what they were taught in school and the edicts of authorities like the FDA. An entire specialty, psychiatry, appears to be nothing short of an outright pseudoscience, yet most physicians in legitimate areas blindly accept it for social reasons, apparently because they are complacent enough to assume that anything they were taught in school and that the government licenses into existence must necessarily be valid. In 2000, the Journal of the AMA published statistics purporting to show that iatrogenic (doctor-inflicted) injury is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., although I admittedly don't know what weight to place on this. In spite of the obvious problems in the profession, many doctors are tremendously arrogant, expecting veneration from everyone just for being doctors. From reading the posts on studentdoctor.net, a popular forum for aspiring doctors, it's clear to me that prestige is often the primary motive for their entering the profession. Most of them vociferously oppose allowing non-physicians such as nurse practitioners to legally take on even menial roles autonomously, and it's obvious that whatever their rationalizations, the real reason is that they fear the loss of money and status that would come with increased competition. My own encounters with doctors have mostly been complete wastes of large amounts of money, and some have even resulted in outright harm. As a result of which I am now reluctant to use the services of doctors except in emergencies because I don't want to give them money or sit there as a patient and pretend to take them seriously. I will say that there are certain areas of medicine that I have tremendous respect for, such as emergency medicine and radiology, and others that I simply have no experience with and know nothing about. I also do realize that acts of government have made the profession miserable even for good doctors, which obviously contributes to the their apparent shortage. However, this does not really overturn my general opinion of the medical community. Is my attitude justified, or do you think I'm being unfair?

Edited April 10, 2015 by happiness

[Nicky]

No, it's not justified. You're not just being unfair, you're paranoid and uninformed.

[StrictlyLogical]

To a degree you are justified in making judgements about trends in industries, cultures, groups of any kind.  But to ascribe any (not to mention ALL) those judgements about an individual just because they belong to the group is a gross error which ignores and individual's free will, volition, and ability to think, be and do independently of others in "their group".

 

 

Example in point:  the vast majority of people in western societies throughout the globe suffer from a great number of errors in philosophy and ethics, from mysticism to altruism, from second handedness to outright vice...  call the people in these western societies Westies.  I can validly say that there are statistical trends among Westies but I could not for example therefor conclude that any of these trends must apply to YOU.  That would be an error in general because without knowing you personally I cannot say anything about you, and it in FACT would be incorrect (if you are an Objectivist).