@Rarebear :). See you are a miracle worker.
I am fine with realistic. I want my doctor to be honest, and to say they don’t know rather than be dismissive, they are not the same thing. One of my complaints with many doctors, not all, is they are in the doctor box. They obviously care about scientific method and standard of care for good reason, but they don’t question enough.
I was talking to a med student, maybe he is an intern, not sure, who is specializing in ID, and he was telling me about chronic Lymes disease and how doctors are ripping off pts because the bacteria is gone, but the body’s immune response persists. These supposed horrible doctors keep the patient coming for antibiotic mega treatments. My question to him was, do the patients improve? He paused, and then started to tell me what a placebo affect is. Even though we had been talking for ten minutes, him actually quizzing me on things, and shocked I knew the answer, he still felt I would not know what a placebo affect is. Just to digress for a minute, that makes me think he was clueless about medicine before he started studying medicine. Anyway, I said to him, what if they improve because there is a second bacteria not found? Not diagnosed? Not discovered yet? I am not saying science on this is wrong about chronic Lymes, I don’t know, but I also think, if a patient improves greatly, pay attention to it. Question the commonly accepted explanation. I am not saying specific to the Lyme example, but in general. He is thinking the text is always right, but anyone who has been in medicine for many years knows that a pretty good percentage of what they learn now, science will disprove it or find a better explanation.
Lyme disease
Stomach Ulcers
Rheumatic Heart
There are tons and tons of diseases previously dismissed as the body turning on itself, and then we finally discover the underlying cause. Those rheumatic illnesses bother me most, because it is so easy to say, aw, your body just went haywire for no reason.