It's also important to find the right doctor, and this can be very hard. I had always been extremely trusting and never cared about anything - when it came to health, go to the doctor, do what they tell you to the letter, no need to think about anything I have no clue about.

Until the doctor - a professor even - gave me advice in a strange crisis that made no sense. He wasn't wrong, he gave exactly the advice that is current "state of the art" for the condition he diagnosed. The problem was, where did that condition come from? The doc didn't care, his job was done. He had a diagnosis and he gave the recommended treatment suggestion (which consists of working on the symptoms, and very badly so, because they don't understand that condition even though it's quite common). Following his treatment I got a huge candida outbreak (and I don't have chemo or AIDS) the symptoms of which he completely ignored. I later got nystatin and then even got diflucan prescribed for three weeks (it wasn't a systemic infection and yet that stuff helped greatly), both those drugs with huge positive effect, but candida isn't a cause but itself a symptom.

I dug deeper and found the root cause. Then I went and found doctors who actually knew something about it. I got treated at a university clinic by a researcher doc with chelators against chronic mercury poisoning. 5 years later: miracles happened. The last one of many was that the endocrinologist put me back on the table to repeat his ultrasound of my right thyroid, which for over twenty years had been double-size and with a 4mm cold nodule - because the nodule was gone, and the thyroid was almost back to normal size. "I'm amazed" was all he could say several times. During chelation I had had "tissue pain" (can't describe it) for a few weeks right around the right thyroid. There is a lot more, like the psoriasis and the tinnitus and many of other long-term problems that just disappeared.

So I'm glad that I ignored the doctor(s), very, very few would find a chronic heavy metal poisoning. Ignoring a doctors opinion and going out on my own was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.

Internet forums, while indeed and truly often horrible, did help me find the problem. You have to filter out over 90%, but one doesn't even have to be an expert to detect the BS. The rest can be valuable when your doctor doesn't find anything. It's not like doctors couldn't find it - it's just that they don't have the time. The waiting room is full, how much time is it worth spending on the problems of any given patient? Especially "functional" problems where you can't actually see anything even with biomedical imaging.

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Completely unrelated to both the previous story and inside that story to the problem I had, I started learning about medical topics, actually out of boredom initially and then got drawn into it. Hundreds of lecture hours and courses later I now understand the basics of anatomy, physiology, had to learn lots of chemistry, org. chem., biochemistry, lots of statistics (never played any significant role in my CS study or in my life), and neuroscience, over 70 courses in total half of which were medical topics. It feels GOOD to know those things, I recommend it to anyone who has some time left for learning. Neuroscience especially should be a must for CS/IT folks, try https://www.mcb80x.org/ for a start and Medical Neuroscience (https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience) as a follow-up, one of the best courses out there mostly because the professor teaching it is wonderful. Don't just learn functional programming with Haskell or Scala, learn brain! :)