Good doctors are pattern matchers. In complex cases they do research by reading books or asking others, but they already have a good idea in what's going on.
A doctor that can only recognize diseases like the common cold is not a good one. Your example is exaggerated and also, the patient may already be dead by the time the investigation is over, which is worsened by the fact that aggressive treatments (like strong antibiotics) can do even more damage, so a good doctor has to have a pretty good grasp on what's going on already.
This is the normal trend here in India. And unfortunately lives are cheap here. Its not like in US that you can sue people, in other parts of the world things are a lot more different. There is practically no regulation in countries like India.
Well I wasn't talking about particular health-care systems, but rather about good doctors, of which you can find everywhere, albeit in a minority.
I don't live in the US. I live in Romania, which has a ruined public healthcare system, but even here I've met medical personnel that's worth their salt.
As an example my now 3-year old suffered from a severe allergic reaction called "Lyle's syndrome" (look it up). We went to the hospital in the early stages and the doctor that took the case immediately recognized it, even though at first it looked like some kind of severe cold/flu (coming in combination with tonsillitis and fever).
After several hours of being hospitalized, his skin pealed off in certain areas, but he was already on both antibiotics and corticoids and so the reaction wasn't so severe as it could have been (imagine your whole skin pealed off, with the same effect as second or third-degree burns). And the problem with weird allergic reactions is that antibiotics from the cephalosporins class or other medicine that produces allergic reactions can kill you.
Also, our doctor went basically blind for the whole time, because the blood tests you perform when the patient is under treatment are mostly useless, being used only to discover how well or not the patient is responding to treatment. For instance she discovered a bacterial infection, which is known to cause Lyle's syndrome, but was it an external infection that caused it or because of an imbalance of intestinal flora due to antibiotics? We also gave him antibiotics before hospitalizing him, that might have also caused this reaction. Lyle's syndrome is known to be caused by both antibiotics and bacterial infections.
The root cause in the case of Lyle's syndrome is extremely important because the treatment and severity of the reaction differs. Our doctor basically took a guess based on how his skin looked.
A doctor that can only recognize diseases like the common cold is not a good one. Your example is exaggerated and also, the patient may already be dead by the time the investigation is over, which is worsened by the fact that aggressive treatments (like strong antibiotics) can do even more damage, so a good doctor has to have a pretty good grasp on what's going on already.