I'm not sure whether you have kids yet or not, but let me relate this:

When my son was three, as part of one of his regular checkups, he got a TB test, where they mark your arm with something, and then you come back in a few days to see what it looks like.

A younger pediatrician looked at it, said, "Eh, it's borderline, but I'm sure it's fine. I just have to have another doctor look at it."

The other doctor, an old guy (who happens to have been both mine and my wife's pediatrician when were were kids), looks at it and says "Oh, he has to go get a chest x-ray."

Now my wife is panicking because she thinks our son has tuberculosis. I spend many hours online trying to figure out what the hell is going on. She has to take him and our infant daughter to the county health center to get x-rays.

The doctor at the health center is going through this long questionnaire: Intravenous drug use? Travel outside the country? Shit like that. We're just a regular suburban family. The guy says, "I have no reason why you were sent here, there's no way he has TB. But I have to take the x-rays."

So my young son has to go by himself to get the x-rays. I wasn't there, but I have to assume he was strapped down, because he was screaming his head off. No way they would have gotten an x-ray unless they strapped him down. Alone. In a strange machine. At three years old. For no reason.

I finally discover that the threshold diameter for the TB test had recently - like six months prior - been reduced from 15mm to 10mm. And the diameter of the welt on my son's arm? 10mm. Had he had the test six months earlier, no one would have batted an eye.

Of course, he didn't have TB. But we had to go through a week of anxiety and suffering all because of what ended up being a bureaucratic decision.

That was the last straw in a series of marginal misdirections we got from doctors, which caused unnecessary stress. Now, if a doctor tells me something that doesn't really seem to make any sense, I don't just defer to the doctor. I'll voice my disagreement.