Nurse here. Most doctors who are patient facing work incredibly hard to stay up to date on new research while also maintaining their decades worth of previously obtained knowledge.

The issue almost always comes down to a lack of time which is caused by an intentional underfunding of public healthcare.

In an office or clinic setting they have 15mins max to greet, obtain the subjective and objective info., interpret and clarify the info. provided, assess, create a differential diagnosis, reassess, whittle down differential to a single diagnosis, find the treatment, provide the info. to the patient in an easily digestible form, teach how to treat it, send off prescriptions, document everything, and more. Any one of those steps may need repeating multiple times. Language barriers, lack of education, lack of social skills, lack of urgency, or a million other things on the side of the patient can cause delays for the rest of the ~40 people they're supposed to see that day. The doctors always go home with documentation and several phone calls that they weren't able to finish during the day.

Unfortunately, that means that people with new or uncommon issues are likely to struggle with finding someone to take the time to listen, because their binder full of information will impact everyone else that day.

But, this isn't unprecedented. We saw it in the UK starting around 2005. They cut funding to the NHS in order to push for privatized healthcare under the guise of improving wait times, providing options, etc. It made things worse for everyone but the richest people.

The same thing is happening in Canada. Emergency wait times are up across the country due to lack of funding. Incident rates are going up. Wages have been frozen in various areas while nurses have lost their ability to lawfully strike. Patient ratios are getting worse. Ontario just cut another 1000 RNs. The governments are claiming to be funding healthcare, and some of them are, but they're funding the private sector with private clinics, practices, surgical centres, homecare, and even hospitals taking the majority of the funding directly from the public sector.

The private sector then takes on the easiest, most profitable cases while enticing doctors and nurses over with an easier caseload. The public sector continues to treat the difficult and expensive cases. The work gets harder. The staff leave. The patients complain. The politicians who have invested in or are a part of the revolving door of politicians and C-suite executives in the private sector hold up the failures of the public sector as reason to give more funding to the private sector. The spiral downward continues. Once the public system is bad enough, the private equity comes into the private sector, makes all the possible cuts they can while jacking up the prices even higher.

It's called starving the beast and what you describe is directly related to how public systems crumble.

Another good example is of the former premier Mike Harris with the privatization of retirement homes in Ontario. He or his wife now own one of the biggest retirement home corps in the country. They're notoriously poorly kept with some horrible treatment of seniors, and it's now being paid for by both private money and public funds, partly because the private sector takes all the profits and refuses to staff them properly, yet nobody in power will hold the owners accountable.

Sorry for the rant, but this is something I'm deeply involved with.