My wife got a degree in midwifery and naturopathic medicine because she gets to spend 90 minutes with patients.

I knew a psychiatrist who saw fifteen patients an hour.

For eight hours a day.

There's a great line in the movie Kandahar where the schlub American who ends up being the "doctor" for a Taliban-controlled village points out that the medical knowledge of the average college-educated Western citizen is greater than the average healer in Waziristan. Thing is, most people in the developed world can figure out what's wrong with them when it's the level of "oh shit I need to go to the doctor" stuff we deal with. When they can't, ANY medical practitioner is gonna have a tough time figuring it out in fifteen minutes. And fifteen minutes is what you get.

Into this gulf does alternative medicine jump.

Yes - not always bad. Often good. My wife is on the couch next to me right now rustling up bili lights for a baby that delivered early. She's run like 8 labs today alone. I watched her write a scrip for antibiotics before lunch. But up here she's plugged into the system, and she got into it because she wanted to help people not write ICD9 codes. Down in Cali she couldn't have done 2/3rds of those things and Cali is hella more integrated than most of the US.

Western medicine is crisis-oriented. If you have a gunshot wound there's nowhere you'd rather be than the US. But if you've got something lifestyle-oriented the US doesn't really know what to do with you other than prescribe drugs. Figuring out anything else takes time, and time can't be billed to insurance.

In an ideal world, the alt-medicine folx are doctors. But that upsets a lot of people.