Even if they are good at problem solving, a series of 10-minute appointments spaced out in 2-3 month intervals while they deal with a case load of hundreds of other patients will not let them do it. That's the environment that most GPs work under in the modern U.S. health care system.

Pay for concierge medicine and a private physician and you get great health care. That's not what ordinary health insurance pays for.

You followed up a sweeping generalization with a sweeping generalization and a touch of bias.

I imagine the issue with problem solving more lays in the system doctors are stuck in and the complete lack of time they have to spend on patients.

Maybe they are, but for most of my interactions with GP's in recent years, and several with specialists, for anything much beyond the very basics, I've had to educate them, and it didn't require much knowledge to exceeds theirs on specific conditions.

In one case, a specialist made arguments that were trivially logically fallacious and went directly against the evidence from treatment outcomes.

In other cases, sheer stupidity of pattern matching with rational thinking seemingly totally turned off. E.g. hearing I'd had a sinus infection for a long time, and insisting that this meant it was chronic and chronic meant the solution was steroids rather than antibiotic, despite a previous course having done nothing, and despite the fact that an antibiotic course had removed most of the symptoms both indicating the opposite - in the end, after bypassing my GP at the time and explaining and begging an advance nurse practitioner, I got two more courses of antibiotic and the infection finally fully went.

I'm sure all of them could have done better, and that a lot of it is down to dysfunction, such as too little time allotted to actually look at things properly, but some of the interactions (the logical fallacy in particular) have also clearly been down to sheer ignorance.

I also expect they'd eventually get there, but doing your own reading and guiding things in the right direction can often short-circuit a lot of bullshit that might even deliver good outcomes in a cost effective way on a population level (e.g. I'm sure the guidance on chronic sinus issues is right the vast majority of time - most bacterial sinus infections either clear by themselves or are stopped early enough not to "pattern match" as chronic), but might cause you lots of misery in the meantime...

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

Is this statement supported by facts? If anything this statement is just your internal sentiment. If you claim it’s not supported by facts the proper thing you should do is offer facts to counter his statement. Don’t claim his statement isn’t supported by facts than make a counter claim without facts yourself.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/07/21/misdiagnoses-cost-the-u-...

Read that fact. 800,000 deaths from misdiagnosis a year is pretty pathetic. And this is just deaths. I can guarantee you the amount of mistakes unreported that don’t result in deaths dwarfs that number.

Boeing the air plane manufacurwe who was responsible for the crashing Boeing 737 mcas units have BETTER outcomes than this. In the year that those planes crashed you have a 135x better survival rate of getting on a 737 max then you are getting an important diagnosis from a doctor and not dying from a misdiagnosis. Yet doctors are universally respected and Boeing as a corporation was universally reviled that year.

I will say this GPs are in general not very competent. They are about as competent and trust worthy as a car mechanic. There are good ones, bad ones, and also ones that bullshit and lie. Don’t expect anything more than that, and this is supported by facts.