>you can't realistically expect to be able to treat yourself if you don't spend a good year or two researching your specific health issues.

There's a big difference between trying to learn everything and about some specific issue. Every doctor would destroy anyone self-taught on general medical knowledge, of course, but in areas that are specifically relevant to that person - anyone of above average intelligence can definitely become more competent than an average doctor, just because the person with a problem is motivated to spend hours or even days finding relevant information. Then there's of course the whole area of surgery where self-treatment is borderline impossible - which is a major part of medical studies.

>For a lot of diseases there are no treatments without serious side-effects, and drugs to address those side-effects can have other side-effects and so on. A lot of symptoms are common to many illnesses, so you need a wide array of information to arrive at a correct differential diagnosis (quickly).

This describes an absolute best case and presents it as the average. Chances are if you go to a doctor with a viral infection you will get a prescription for antibiotics, an obvious absurdity. Why? Because a patient expects 'something', so doing that makes the uninformed patient happier - while in reality, at best it's minimally harmful.

This is so prevalent there are multiple studies about this, eg:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5093394/

"More than half the GP respondents to the survey in Australia self-reported that they would prescribe antibiotics for an URTI to meet patient expectations. Our qualitative findings suggest that ‘patient expectations’ may be the main reason given for inappropriate prescribing, but it is an all-encompassing phrase that includes other reasons."

More than half! That's the actual quality of care that's being delivered, it's worse than doing nothing at all. Risk of side effects is completely ignored. Millions of people have allergy to amoxicillin, one of the most commonly prescribed one.

My opinion based on my experiences, experiences of others and studies like that - is that advice from an average doctor is completely worthless. Of course there are competent doctors - but there's a contradiction here: for any specific problem, the only way to determine competency is to become competent yourself, but the moment you do, you stop needing the advice. Therefore, as long as you're capable of doing research based on symptoms, and the situation isn't an emergency - going to a doctor is pointless. Yet the law system is doing everything it can to force me.

>Not to mention, while classes of life saving medications are highly addictive, so patient's access to them must be carefully managed to avoid making their lives even worse. Benzodiazepines, as in TFA, are a good example.

This is paternalism and it's abhorrent. In fact I have another related real life story: my grandma has extreme sleep problems and no OTC supplements helped. After some research I decided that etizolam is the safest and most likely to help drug - which turned out to be right, as it worked perfectly for over 2 years, along with a very strong increase in general mood (etizolam itself is mildly anxiolytic - but probably mostly due to more sleep) and mental capability. No side effects reported. Unfortunately it became a controlled substance here (even though in some countries it's a normal prescription drug - at least Japan and Italy) and she definitely didn't want to break any laws. As the daily dose was small (0.7mg before sleep - chosen experimentally as the minimum one that worked), there were no noticeable withdrawal symptoms. Went to a doctor, eventually got a prescription for zolpidem. Result: works for sleep, but also caused an enormous increase in depression symptoms and noticeable memory problems. Real life result from "managing access".