I've missed parts of this thread, but here are my own reasons for not ENTIREly trusting doctors:
1. In my HMO, my doctor gets about 15 minutes with me, 20 max. After that, she's supposed to be on to the next person (I know that she's under these orders because an acquaintance of mine is a doc for the same HMO.) During those 15 minutes she has to ask questions, listen, make a determination, explain it to me, AND enter data about all of this into my electronic record AT THE SAME TIME, not later. I'm over 50, and she's been my doctor for maybe 2 years, so there's no possible way she could know much about my history. I don't see her often enough! This is the HMO's standard, which seems to me the irreducible minimum excuse for treatment. I'm sure my doctor's a smart, decent woman but she's being crushed into a VERY bad system.

2. In order to get through medical training, she had to be intensely competitive, and she had to survive a couple of years of absolutely brutal overwork combined with constant sleep deprivation, which is a form of trauma used effectively for torture and brain-washing. If all of your schooling had taken place under conditions of high trauma and very low sleep, how well do you really think you'd remember it? What kind of effect would years of intense competitiveness and sleep deprivation and threat of loss of status, what would that do to you in the long term? What sort of a person would you be likely to be as a result of that? I think our method of training doctors is god-awful, pretty much guaranteed to turn out egotistical, self-absorbed, but admittedly BRAINY in a tunnel-vision way, robots.

3. In all those years of intense training, here are courses that are NOT generally taught, or weren't until quite recently: The mind-spirit-body connection. Nutrition (a pretty vast subject, with many competing schools of thought; you could put together at least a full year of study on this alone). Study of miraculous recoveries (that's a baffling ommission; if you're trying to get people well, wouldn't you want to study people who have gotten well?). What constitutes true health. The effects of love and/or prayer on illness and recovery. Bedside manner, or loving your patients, or caring about your fellow human being. Which alternative therapies work on what and why.

4. Now that she's out of med school and practicing, my doc and her HMO get bombarded with an endless flood of promotional material, free samples, videos, handouts, personal phone calls, from drug companies whose primary motivation is -- what, do you suppose? Raising our national level of wellbeing? Diminishing the number of obese or diabetic or drug-addicted people in the country? No, no no no no, silly -- it's MONEY, of course! Profits. The bottom line. I don't think that my doctor or, more important, her bosses the HMO, are immune to all that financial incentive to hand out the latest high-profit drugs like so much popcorn.

I have an acupuncturist whom I've seen off and on over ten years, who ALWAYS schedules me for a full 45 minutes to an hour, always actually talks to me at some length, knows me and my history and the names of my kids. She's very knowledgeable, has often prescribed Chinese herbs for various things for me, but doesn't pretend to be able to cure everything, and has sent me to traditional western medicos when necessary. Acupuncture has worked very well on me for many things--obviously not for everything. Who would you rather consult?

Here's a digression, about some of the really good things that doctors and western medicine have given us:
A Jewish Boycott: Comic Sam Levinson says: "It's a free world and you don't have to like Jews, but if you don't, I suggest that you boycott certain Jewish products, like...

The Wasserman Test for syphilis

Insulin, discovered by Dr. Minofsky

Chloral Hydrate, discovered by Dr. Lifreich

The Schick Test for Diphtheria

Vitamins, discovered by Dr. Funk

Streptomycin, discovered by Dr. Woronan

Polio Pill by Dr. Sabin

Polio Vaccine by Dr. Jonas Salk.

Says Levinson: "You want to be mad at us? Be mad at us! But I'm telling you, you ain't going to feel so good."