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Honestly this pushes me the other way. I’ve found straightforward by-the-book medicine to be largely useless in resolving any of the health issues I’ve had (other than one infection, at which point the doctor was just a hoop to jump through to get the antibiotics I knew I needed.)
As such, whenever I’ve had a doctor actually solve my problem, it was less because they were a doctor and more because they were an extremely high-iq person with enough exposure to health problems to discern the zebra-problem from the hoofbeats.
I can go through the checklists and find the normal issues myself. Hell, I can set a bone, pick medications out of the available options, or look at my bloodwork myself too. It’s like changing your car oil, just a series of steps.
What I can’t do is realize that I have a 1/1000000 congenital heart issue because of a weird head feeling I get, or know what the proper course of action is after that. Luckily for me I found a doctor who could, and it only took going through a dozen doctors who were useless.
My experience with that last doctor was completely incomparable to any of the others, and I desperately wish there was a way to differentiate the two. Frankly, they don’t even seem like they should have the same job title any more than the attendant at a Jiffy Lube and a Lamborghini mechanic should both just be called “mechanics.”
Personally, I despise having these kind of gatekeepers. An MD is the magic licence which will let you get anything (aside from controlled substances) from a pharmacy with a minimum of paperwork. Anything less than that -- even having studied pharmacy -- will get you nothing over a random person in the street.
A better system would allow amateur level qualifications which allow you to get a larger selection of drugs (like anything you had been prescribed before for a chronic problem, like thyroxine) over the counter.
Or just allow anything (possibly excepting controlled substances) OTC, and let natural selection sort it out.
Naturally, antibiotics are a special case because humans pay a collective price for irresponsible individual use (multiresistant organisms), so it makes sense to regulate that. Perhaps give licensed amateurs the right to buy one treatment of a first level antibiotic treatment per three years, plus the right to buy an appropriate specific antibiotic after lab tests show it their bacteria will respond to that. (Of course, the last line of antibiotics should be administered in insulation wards where you will either leave negative or feet first (if the bacterium develops a resistance).)
A number of degrees and licenses have prescribing rights in the U.S. right now (including NPs and PAs in most states).
Keep in mind that an overwhelming fraction of the population will prescribe themselves into bad outcomes if given the ability to do so, and often demand that their providers do so (with variable success).
Antibiotics as you note, is the classic example. People will demand antibiotics for viral infections. They will demand antibiotics when they don't need them. They will demand stronger antibiotics. They'll blow up their tendons or give themselves C Diff or one of any other number of things.
People will take thyroid medication wrong, or even easy to avoid fucking up things like most blood pressure medication. They'll take two medications that are fine alone but will fuck up your kidneys together.
Patients are idiots. That includes high education, high intelligence patients because they have a lot of overconfidence (just as doctors have overconfidence in domains outside of medicines).
But most people aren't high education and high intelligence anyway and you'll get a ton of people killed and cause extremely expensive, avoidable morbidity if you take the guardrails away.
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You can just order from Petmeds and sketchy foreign pharmacies, like the rest of us.
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This generalizes for basically every profession and even moreso since the internet exists now.
That being said 50-80% of the population likely doesn’t have that IQ I need the relatively smart doctor who can do the read the internet for cure thing.
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