It's not that strange an idea given the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry essentially bribes doctors to prescribe their drugs, or the frequency with which health care organizations defraud Medicare and insurance companies, fraud which often takes the form of unnecessary medical procedures. Blindly trusting any professional is the strange idea (I agree that constant distrust is probably unhelpful).

That's because a lot of doctors are untrustworthy (being people), and as the years roll by many have watched our loved ones suffer and die in horrifying pain

IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU

Possibly because in the past there was a notion that doctors would lie to their patients "for their own good", and that the doctor's decision about your care was something you had to just accept.

The notion that patients could advocate for their own care arose during the boomers' lifetime.

Powerful lobbies are surpressing the number of doctors practicing in the US. If a foreign doctor wants to emigrate and practice here they cannot until they pass TOEFL (reasonable) AND finish US-based residencies, of which there are few. I know a Russian dermatologist who has been a receptionist for years because she cannot get ECFMG certification. Some states are wising up and waiving the residencies, but way more need to do it.

I'm not complaining about immigration. Only idiots and assholes complain about that.

Doctors might schedule less patients per day and increase the number of patients seen overall. It's not like over scheduling doesn't have other effects besides being infuriating. It means they rush through the visit, ask few follow-up questions and decrease the chance I'll have a solution in that one visit. I may have to come back again after the useless piece of non-applicable advice they gave me doesn't work.

I guess a lot of lemmings work in doctors offices or something. It's not an unfair ask at all to not routinely wait many minutes past your appointment time. It's very fair. Yet itt several users push back against this idea as though the waiting isn't anyone's fault. Yes, it is. And we deserve better.

If they schedule fewer patients then maybe they'd feel like they have time to talk to me and we'd actually solve my issue so I don't come back two weeks later, further gumming up the system. "Even fewer"? A recent doctor experience I had was arriving early for a 9:45 appointment to an absolutely jam packed waiting room where I had to wait literally almost two hours to be seen. By your logic, they weren't seeing many patients and it's a bad solution to see fewer. At one point it was announced they were about an hour behind schedule. Even that was very incorrect for me, almost by a factor of 2.

I cannot pinpoint all the problems behind the scenes but it's 100% clear multiple people are not operating honestly. If you make an appointment time, you should plan to not have patients wait hours past that. You the doctor office did something wrong and it was avoidable. They probably over scheduled and then also the doctor came in late. Again I don't know the details but I do know they fucked up and that's not uncommon and it's also not something to dismiss as patients expecting too much.

TIL Doctors cannot write legibly nor manage a basic queueing process.