You are completely misunderstanding me- I am not talking about rejecting things just because they come from an authority.
I fundamentally reject that experts can make universal medical protocols that can be blindly applied by ignorant practitioners without high rates of really bad outcomes. It is done to execute cheap commodity medicine at scale, but it will never compare to having medical care from someone with deep understanding and individual context.
These type of context-free ignorant protocols will frequently do things to patients that are wildly inappropriate and dangerous in a way that would be obvious to people that actually know what they are doing, but completely missed by the average doctor. For example, a patient with regular bloodwork where every single kidney function related lab result is on the very edge of the acceptable range, but they're all marked green by some official cutoff, so the doctor doesn't even notice the biological pattern being presented- and is blindsided when the patient comes back later on with serious nephropathy.
Even worse- intelligent people that understand the evidence and the biology will self select out of even participating in developing such protocols- because the whole concept is nonsense. So these protocols are themselves mostly ignorant and outdated, and not developed by competent people.
One cannot commodify technical knowledge into simple protocols, especially with something as complex and poorly understood as biology. The only time this is optimal is in something extremely routine with no impossible to anticipate exceptions, or in an emergency where there is no time for careful problem solving: e.g. as checklists are used in aviation. In medicine they are only appropriate for first aid type situations.
Yes, when I have a health problem I generally read the scientific literature and understand it before accepting any treatment, unless it is an emergency where I am unable to. I do understand the mechanism of action for most of the OTC drugs (or as much as is known of them), and I am much more reluctant to administer OTC drugs to myself than most people are. For example, I would not take a Benadryl unless I was having a serious allergic reaction, because of the known risks of anticholinergics. I have a decades of training and scientific research experience in studying and modeling the biological mechanisms of drugs, and have patented drugs that are in clinical trial.
The following quote sums up my opinion of medical protocols better than I can:
"Knowledge isn’t a commodity, especially not a fungible commodity, as the medical business sees it. Consciousness and culture are part of the life process. It is exactly the commoditization of medical knowledge that makes it dangerous, and generally stupid. Doctors buy their knowledge, and then resell it over and over; it’s valuable as a commodity, so its value has to be protected by the equivalent of a copyright, the system of laws establishing the profession. Without its special status, its worthlessness would be quickly demonstrated. When A.C. Guyton wrote his textbook of medical physiology (the most widely used text in the world) in the 1950s, it was trash; as it was studied and applied by generations of physicians, it was still trash. The most compliant patients who bought their treatment from the most authoritative, Guytonesque, doctors were buying their own disability and death.
Each time you learn something, your consciousness becomes something different, and the questions you ask will be different; you don’t know what the next appropriate question will be when you haven’t assimilated the earlier answers. Until you see something as the answer to an urgent question, you can’t see that it has any value. The unexpected can’t be a commodity. When people buy professional knowledge they get what they pay for, a commodity in a system that sustains ignorance."
-Ray Peat, PhD