I don’t know anything about the specifics of this case. I do know there are lots of bad doctors. Doctors routinely make mistakes or overlook things, especially relatively trivial things like this.

I don’t know what people think you learn in medical school that makes you an infallible source of health knowledge.

Those invoking Dunning-Kruger are, with high probability, an instance of just that :) (also, see the comment below that touches upon the many gaps in the original paper, which is at this point just garbage invoked by midwits). Finally, there’s a thing called heterogeneous treatment effects, which really is hard to detect at medical research scale … and placebo effects, if they help with the underlying issue without breaking the bank, and still helpful.

> Holy Dunning-Kruger effect…

Do you know they’re wrong? Please don’t invoke Dunning Kruger like this, it’s cliché and also wrong to do. There’s no indicator for whatever it is Dunning & Kruger showed, you cannot know if it applies to a single person. Their main plot showed a positive correlation between confidence and competence. Their paper has problems, their methodology has been rightly questioned, and some attempts to reproduce have failed. Plus keep in mind that, ironically, for people who are intimately familiar with the debate over DK, using it to essentially name-call someone backfires and has the opposite of the intended effect, it makes the name caller look confidently ignorant.

Trained doctors pushed opiates and benzos on me when they were very much not needed and in both cases led to dependancies and horrific withdrawals. I'm sure many others can chime in with their own similar experiences. Medical professionals are incredibly crucial to the wellbeing of society, but they have also been responsible for much suffering because they are human just like us.