Agree 100%. The corollary is that, if you must play, make sure that you yourself are the best expert of your medical history, symptomology, and candidate hypotheses about what may be going on with your health. This is difficult, and perhaps futile, but the sad truth is that due to time issues (and probably information overload) it's your job to a) bootstrap the MD with whatever is relevant about your condition, and b) sanity-check the MD's decisions.
Failure to do either of those things is likely to result in either suboptimal care in the best case, actively misleading care in the worst. I guess the silver lining is that Google + intelligent and motivated person >= most MD diagnoses in my experience.
Since few MDs can actually stay on top of the latest developments for all the different items that cross their desks, UpToDate serves as a curated summary of many medical conditions, and is updated every 6 months (? maybe 9, it's been a while) for each topic.
It is a subscription service, and if you are dealing with anything in between problematic-to-serious, it is well worth subscribing for a month. If the language is difficult in whatever article seems relevant to you, it is worth figuring out the language because it will provide a good jumping-off point to go examine the literature on which it is based (which is likely your next stop, for serious conditions.)
I second this. In fact, the big secret is that all doctors use this as reference these days in clinical practice settings, while in the backroom on a computer. It is literally the doctor's goto wikipedia.
Failure to do either of those things is likely to result in either suboptimal care in the best case, actively misleading care in the worst. I guess the silver lining is that Google + intelligent and motivated person >= most MD diagnoses in my experience.