It's really not that easy to get a doctor any random place in America. I live in a city in a larger metropolitan area; it is in the county which has the worst medical care in the state: we pay more (federal study), we are underserved (state study) and the medical conglomerates which control care delivery extract more profit... in absolute dollars... from this county than the richer, younger, whiter, more populous adjacent county (union study).

The epidemic of nonreproducible scientific studies is... an epidemic and it's astounding nobody pays attention.

Ten years ago I was misdiagnosed with a condition, at least in part because the closet Stalist "doctors" thought my body should fight off the infection... didn't wanna cause any antibiotic resistance, ya know.

When my wife suffered a detached retina, they opened the surgical wing of a regional hospital on a Saturday to fix it. (They did a great job.)

For years I got the PSA as part of my yearly physical. This test has a lot of false positives. Eventually it was positive two years in a row so I was "ok doc, guess you gotta start feeling my prostate". He looked definitely uncomfortable and found an excuse not to do it until the next year. He told me to go research it on the internet. I don't get the PSA any more, it's not the answer to any question: "do you want to know more?"

Let me pause to point out that we're really good at heroic measures which cost a lot of money and not so good at, you know, health. We see this in Covid, where if people are hospitalized we're willing to take all kinds of heroic measures, even if it kills them... but I don't see a lot of interest by the medical establishment in prophylactics or early mitigations (I know it's out there).

Moving on, the "doctor" doesn't want to give me a professional opinion, notwithstanding that he doesn't understand Bayes. "Do you want to know more?": That might be an ok manipulation on a web site, but it has no place in medical care.

We're supposed to be enabled to purchase medical care, but we're not supposed to do it based on price or quality. So I suppose the first thing we're supposed to buy is more information so we can make the right decision because it's "your own fault" if you're ignorant: "do you want to know more?"

Well, I worked at biotechs I at least have NBC safety training.

Crunching data from different sources concerning all things COVID doesn't reach the same conclusions. Stuff is reported and defined differently. Obvious questions from an epidemiologic standpoint aren't answered. Stuff seems to be omitted for curious reasons. Contact tracers can't contact 1/3rd of positives for followup? We don't know the race of 45% of the patients in hospitals? What kind of living and working conditions does it spread in?

As for the vaccine, it is leaky and most definitely not sterilizing. Funny that doctors understand how slathering yourself in antibiotics (mayonnaise optional) leads to resistant bac and it's most def not ok to give them to livestock, but "antibiotics ok"... until the science... the actual science, catches up: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...

It's as obvious that the powers that be have no interest in actual public health as it is that they lack the intellect and public trust to do so.

As a student of human nature it is also obvious that belief and science are orthogonal, as quite evidently people can have faith in science without ever exercising the testing and critical evaluation required. It's impossible to understand medical care without understanding the conditions under which it is delivered.