I will give one more in response to fogie...

I can site a case where a friend of my mothers who actually worked within the health profession (as did Pip, she was a physiotherapist)... she had headaches and problems for a couple of years and trusted her GP who had her down as some kind of "mild nutcase with imagined symtoms"... turned out she had a brain tumour.

She is still alive and I believe after a second op is doing fine but she would have been much better off if she hadn't have believed her own GP.

Which leads me to...

Those with supposedly minor mental health problems... It is strange range they are the case you cite with the most difficulty in accepting unless you consider...

These people are, unless as in the case of the person I mentioned above who actually had a phyiscal problem to prove a point, are so easily branded "nuts". They have little means of proof on way or other. And it's so easy for the public to believe doctor's blunders without that proof when it is calimed "the patient has a mental problem"...

Jon