While all the docs I saw were "friendly", they were all in a hurry, which is probably imposed by the hospital they work for (where applicable), but 2 of the ort

While all the docs I saw were "friendly", they were all in a hurry, which is probably imposed by the hospital they work for (where applicable), but 2 of the orthopedic surgeons I saw were father and son, with their own practice. Nevertheless, each of them were incredibly late (over 30 min) seeing me. So I would suppose that greed is a component. The son literally came into the exam room with a laptop showing my X-Rays, said I don't have arthritis, went to leave, I had to stop him and kind of press him because he didn't diagnose me with anything, then he did some test where he pressed my thumbs into their joints and asked if that hurt. It did. Then he said that I have arthritis in my thumb joints. This is the kind of sloppiness I would expect from the juniorist of junior developers, not a medical doctor who spent over a decade in school and specializes in orthopedics. Needless to say, that same maneuver does not hurt my thumbs anymore, and I brought this up when I saw his dad a couple of weeks later. He said something to the effect of "well sometimes arthritis comes and goes" and then changed the subject. The sheer arrogance (I don't think it's incompetence) in that building was astounding. So I, a 27 year old with no signs of arthritis on X-Rays, have arthritis that "comes and goes", even though I continue to work a desk job for 8 hours a day. Makes sense. I saw a hand surgeon who said the arthritis diagnosis was wrong and couldn't explain why he made that diagnosis. When the nerve conduction study came back normal, it was subtly suggested that the pain might be psychosomatic since I mentioned the pain went down when I started taking an SSRI. So after being told by 3 docs it was carpal tunnel syndrome, and then the neurologist saying it wasn't, I went back to the Internet, and stumbled upon Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. It fit so perfectly, and the provocative tests for it immediately made my symptoms worse. At the follow-up with the hand surgeon, I brought this up after she said something to the effect of "well, it's not CTS so I can't help you, here's a prescription for physical therapy, good luck", she immediately said that "TOS is very rare, and it would have shown on the nerve conduction study". This is obviously false (even without the research papers I found) because performing stretches and exercises meant to treat TOS have been incredibly effective for me. Complete shitshow. And of course I had to pay ~$1000 for all that. It's funny how we can see doctors who are either wrong or unable to come to a diagnosis, and we have to pay them anyway, but if a plumber comes to my house, says I have a bad septic tank, then proceeds to replace my kitchen faucet, obviously I am not going to pay him. I think my issue was that I was not assertive ENOUGH with these docs, but of course I don't want to be "that guy". Kind of a lose-lose situation.