Yes, “Go to a doctor” was in many cases very bad advice, and in most cases, uselss advice. Meanwhile, I have recovered perfectly from every single one of the complaints I’ve ever had for which I did not go to a doctor.
Worst case, a doctor over-aggressively put me on blood pressure medication, resulting in a sudden drop in blood pressure, which coupled with my cup-to-disc ratio, triggered sudden and irreversible blindness in one eye. Same doctor put me on cyanocobalamin for vitamin B-12 deficiency, which had no effect, and my present doctor calls it a placebo.
I quit going to doctors for kidney stones, because all they did was a series of annoying tests I was in no mood for to verify that they were kidney stones, then tell me to wait for them to pass. For Hep-A, go home and get plenty of rest, you’ll recover. I did. For Retinitis Pigmentosa, doctors advive was apply for disbility, you’ll get worse and be blind forever. Sciatica, I was referred to a pain specialist, he wanted to give me a steroid shot and do surgery if that didn’t work. I said let’s try PT, he said OK, and with PT it went away and never came back. Othrewise, I look up antibiotics on internet for the condition I have, but pharmacies won’t give them to me until I go and let a doctor defraud Medicare and give me a script.
I won’t go to a doctor unless I absolutely have to (not every time somebody says “Go see a doctor”), and that policy has worked 100% of the time for 77 years.