> The doctor is basing their judgement on current consensus within their field, which hopefully involves careful studies. Medicine is unfortunately not nearly

> The doctor is basing their judgement on current consensus within their field, which hopefully involves careful studies. Medicine is unfortunately not nearly as scientific as you might wish - I worked for the British Medical Journal a while back and they are all about evidence-based medicine... unfortunately, there is still a lot of medicine that's based off of received knowledge or observational evidence, which may or may not be accurate. The situation is changing though as things get proper studies done, but it's not always easy to get decent results and so current consensus can and does change over time as research gets done.