My blood pressure wasn't being taken correctly and was all over the place because of the excruciating pain I have from the blood pressure cuff. Finally one of the nurse practitioners in the office suggested I take it by wrist monitor and bring the monitor in to see if it was accurate/correlated with their arm cuff (it does) and now each quarter I come in I just bring in a week's worth of 3x a day, 3-at-a-time, measurements.

My particular doctor is more a test/give meds than take time to figure out. My husband and I use to see the doctor together, save the doctor some time so he can bill the same amount but get paid twice for the time it takes to see 1-1/2 people :-) But my husband once inexplicably asked for his own appointment and when we were driving home, I found out he'd thought he would have to have a prostate exam but no, he told the doctor his symptoms and the doctor wrote him a prescription, said, "Here, see if these work".

I don't do "automatic" meds and am forever arguing with the television (for some reason don't win many arguments :-) because the medical and health ads will contradict each other or the small print they now have to read will be worse than whatever it's trying to cure, etc. I don't so much as contradict what my doctor says as research it more than he does, for my own personal case.

Doctor's know "general" stuff, their medicine but not how it may specifically fit an individual. That's why I don't get particularly mad at my doctor for telling my husband to "try this" it's not like the doctor can ever know how it might work with my husband; all he has is the information/symptoms my husband is telling him, to go by. But I do fault my husband for just accepting, blindly, that the doctor has a clue how things will develop for my husband in particular and for not paying attention to his own body. We're the experts on ourselves and how we feel; like you say, LadyMac, one's instincts are important. My husband doesn't get that.