[andymism]

I agree that, in general, you should educate yourself about what your doctor is telling you and push back a little bit. It's probably a good practice of any thinking person.

Routine conditions are a case where self-diagnosing will yield adequate results most of the time. But outside of the most common conditions, a smart but not medically trained person will end up treating symptoms rather than causes. A good example is blood pressure. You can walk into any pharmacy and find out within a minute if you have high blood pressure. For 80% of cases, you could probably just look up the most popular generic medication, start at a low dose and adjust a month at time until your blood pressure is normal. But what about the underlying cause? It could be an endocrine system problem, enlarged heart, arterial narrowing of the blood vessels from the kidneys, or ion channel exchange imbalances, to name a few. It is routine for a general practitioner to check for these and other causes and interpret the results of their tests, but is decidedly not routine for most smart people.