Actual expertise, competence and integrity is typically extremely expensive and hard to come by. Luckily, most cases are fairly routine that the majority of the time for the average person it doesn't really matter in the end. It's not like most can afford the best anyway.
Just take any profession that your retail consumer might get access to and the same spread applies.
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that it's ultimately you who will get fucked up; you'll be the victim, you're the one punished for the mistakes of others.
And no in the sense that the social contract says different -- otherwise, you'd be responsible for baking your own bread AND manufacturing and fixing your car AND writing your own computer & smartphone programs AND taking care of your health AND educating your children AND cultivating your land and growing your own produce AND so on and on. We have "distribution of work" for a reason; you take the money, you take responsibility. (Except most doctors.)
So, "no", it's not your job, but "yes", you're held accountable for it.
Just because the social contract gets violated left and right, the violations aren't right.
People always emphasize that responsibility and authority should go hand in hand, and this is a prime example where that principle is shown invalid -- it's a human construction and does not hold up in nature. You have no authority to even understand your own health sufficiently, yet you get to bear the consequences.
What you are arguing for is that everyone should judge a professional from a position of lacking education / information. That's precisely what the social contract is not. I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm saying the state of the world is fundamentally wrong; it's way too easy to disclaim responsibility. Someone takes my money, they're on the hook.
People shouldn't trust the social contract, but you can't blame them for trusting it. Most of the time there's no way around trusting it.
Case in point - just last month: To bring my LDL further down, I was prescribed a doubling of my existing statin dosage. I checked with an LLM and it turns out it's a crap idea, as doubling only weakly increases the effect, while the unwanted impacts on the body increase. Supplementing the existing dosage with bempedoic acid or Ezetimbe would be a way better strategy. I brought this up with the doctor, who immediately agreed it's a better idea and changed my prescription.
It's your body, your health, your future, your loved ones, your home, your career, your investment, your savings. If you care, check the work, the tools exist and are now ridiculously accessible.
Well I certainly have an excuse: at work, code reviews provided by a particular LLM have been a net negative contribution, in my judgement. And then it's not hard to extrapolate that experience to other professions, ones that I myself am not competent in.
The old adage exists where you read the Sunday newspaper, get a nice educative experience from 14 out of the 16 pages, but then 2 pages happen to write about your own profession, and you seethe about the rampant stupidities and mischaracterizations in those 2 pages. But the other 14, about stuff you are not directly familar with, sound good. See the problem?
You got lucky because your doctor was receptive to ideas from sources other than his own brain (LLM or otherwise). Most medical professionals laugh you (or curse you) out of the room, if you attempt to make an informed decision. In fact the most selective search criterion for doctors, as a patient, is willing to talk.
If you care about something, take in interest in it and learn to advocate for it. Don't conflate handing someone money with making them care about you.
Do also remember though that more people are struggling than you probably realize. That includes the people you are paying. The world is not easy right now, but it rarely has been. I'm not religious, but the concept of grace does have an appeal.
Ultimately, I find thinking macro helps. Realizing it often doesn't matter or would create an unnecessary trade off can help. Advocate. But pick your battles. More and more of us are running on empty, part of taking care of yourself is learning what to care about and what to let go.
Most don't realize that "Meritocracy" was coined and popularized as a slur and was meant to be a dystopian concept.
The other problem is that when you do try to engage with those professionals in technical terms, most are utterly unable or unwilling to communicate with you on that level. Trying to actually get the "informed" part of informed consent makes the level of revealed incompetence jump from maybe ~50% to 90%. Only very rarely do I find a doctor (or really any professional) willing to get technical, even as they ask me for approval about technical decisions!
The fundamental dynamic, as always, is they want to claim authority while disclaiming responsibility.
The big difference is that if those other professionals fuck up, then the damage is usually done to some object. An object you can get fixed again (by someone else), or replaced, or you can even throw it away perhaps. This doesn't apply to doctors. The damage they can do can be irreversible, the damage is done to your body. This means they should take all the more responsibility. Yet what we see is that they disclaim responsibility to such a huge extent that most of those other professionals can't.
Most doctors have a god complex.
For doctors it's mostly the latter. I've had consultations with surgeons and talked to many (ex)-patients of them and the correlation between price and skill is not great. Some with the best reputation rely very heavily on marketing and many have just as many skeletons in their closet.
Every professional has their peeves and once set they imagine them everywhere. I suspect part of taking your car to a second mechanic is finding one who is neutral on the exact problem you're having. I had a car fail emissions and the diagnosis was a new set of injectors for a good fraction of the value of the vehicle. My fiancee got a recommendation from a coworker for a shop near our apartment. Replaced some worn EGR hoses for $200 and I passed with flying colors. Same shop talked me out of another repair I thought I needed. Kept going to that guy for several years after we moved to the opposite end of town.
Most people see a PCP that doesn't really have the means to recommend you for thousands of dollars of treatments that he'll oversee. Instead he refers you to a specialist, but you still have your PCP to rely on to say "Hey, this specialist says I need surgery for this, is that reasonable or should I get a second opinion".
But when you go to the dentist and he says you have 15 cavities and need two root canals immediately and he can get you an appointment as soon as tomorrow to get started, a lot of people will just do it without seeking a second opinion since there's a lot of friction to finding a new dentist and undergoing a second exam.
When I needed a root canal, I self-referred myself to an endodontist both as a second opinion and for his expertise at doing the procedure. My dentist's dental tech seemed surprised I wanted to go somewhere else for the root canal, she said "Well, most people like Dr Xxxxx do it, he's very good at root canals".
Even ignoring RVU's, most specialists will want to treat a problem with their speciality if it would be an effective treatment so a second opinion is almost always a good idea. I shopped around for treatment for a procedure I needed, the robotic surgeon recommended robotic surgery, the laser specialist recommended laser surgery, the general internal medicine doctor gave a few less invasive alternatives. I researched them all, went back to my PCP and picked the procedure I wanted to have done.
I should have gone for a second opinion before letting her drill. Now I have a mouth full of composites but we find 0 cavities every time I go in for a checkup.
She also fucked up one of the fillings and that did get a cavity under it, during Covid. Cost me a tooth.
I once went to 3 orthopedic specialists and got 3 different suggestions (1 was surgery!) and I did none of them and the problem resolved itself in a few months.
I was having a lot of problems with my ankle and my martial arts instructor's personal PT did a workshop which showed me what was wrong. Later on I screwed up my opposite hip hopping around like someone younger, and the exercises from the second PT fixed most of my remaining issues.
A lot of joint pain and some back pain is posture related. If you stop walking and standing like an idiot a lot of these problems go away. Particularly with the spine, muscle guarding can seize up a muscle so hard that it overcorrects and pulls things out of position in the opposite direction.
Be warned though that the cumulative pain your PT might inflict on you during exercise might rival the pain of the surgery your doctor prescribed. But you won't have scars, more money in your pocket, and a set of exercises that you can try to remember when you relapse in five to ten years.
I recently (few months, maybe) posted how I went to 3x orthopedic surgeons, who all ran tests, and all recommendations were "you need surgery on this shoulder".
Six months later, the pain started receding, 2 years later, absolutely zero pain.
For non-emergency things, it's usually better to just take a wait and see attitude.
Not as familiar with dentistry for but for "AI doctor", FDA needs to either create new categories or approve AI care under medical device and software as a medical device (SaMD) standards, state medical boards need to relax the licensure grip on scope of care, and CMS needs to create new CPT codes (which are largely dictated by the AMA i.e. lobbying group for physicians) so there's a way to bill insurance for AI-provided care.
Unfortunately we have a much better system for maximizing physician wages than minimizing patient cost of care. Doctor demand is guaranteed by frequently tying legal, reimbursable care to physician labor, and doctor supply is limited by the number of available residency slots. Ironically it makes doctors miserable because they're ridiculously overworked due to the excess demand and constrained supply.
There are a lot of procedures that are too expensive to do if the likelihood of negative results is high.