That's a sweeping generalization unsupported by facts.

In reality you'll find the vast majority of GPs are highly intelligent and quite good at problem solving.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say their training is so intensive and expansive that laypeople who make such comments are profoundly lacking in awareness on the topic.

Physicians are still human, so like anything there's of course bad ones, specialists included. There's also healthcare systems with various degrees of dysfunction and incentives that don't necessarily align with the patient.

None of that means GPs are somehow less competent at solving problems; not only is it an insult but it's ridiculous on the face of it.

I can attest to this from personal experience.

After undergoing stomach surgery 8 years ago I started experiencing completely debilitating stomach aches. I had many appointments with my GP and a specialist leading to endoscopies, colonoscopies, CAT scans, and MRI scans all to no avail and they just kept prescribing more and more anti-acids and stronger painkillers.

It was after seven years of this that I paid for a private food allergy test to find that I am allergic to Soya protein. Once I stopped eating anything with Soya in it the symptoms almost completely vanished.

At my next GP appointment I asked why no-one had suggested it could be an allergic reaction only to be told that it is not one of the things they check for or even suggest. My faith in the medical community took a bit of a knock that day.

On a related note, I never knew just how many foods contain Soya flour that you wouldn't expect until I started checking.

My current one sure as hell is.

My previous one was, too.

The one I had as kid, well. He was old, stuck in old ways, but I still think he was decent at it.

But seeing the doctor is a bit more difficult these days, since the assistants are backstopping. They do some heavy lifting / screening.

I think an LLM could help with symptoms and then looking at the most probable cause, but either way I wouldn't take it too serious. And that is the general issue with ML: people take the output too serious, at face value. What matters is: what are the cited sources?

You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers

They’re not even trained for memorization. They’re trained for mitigation and I don’t really blame them for the crap pay they receive. Over the course of a 40-year career they basically make what a typical junior dev makes. It’s fast becoming a rich man’s hobby career.

It's an incentives issue, not a training issue

This.

I wouldn't be surprised if AI was better than going to GP or many other specialists in majority of cases.

And the issue is not with the doctors themselves, but the complexity of human body.

Like many digestive issues can cause migraines or a ton of other problems. I am yet to see when someone is referred to gut health professional because of the migraine.

And a lot of similar cases when absolutely random system causes issues in seemingly unrelated system.

A lot of these problems are not life threatening thus just get ignored as they would take too much effort and cost to pinpoint.

AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise.