Completely agree with your post. I think it ultimately comes down to this: people "just wanna be fixed." They want a magic pill that will solve their problem or the single surgery that will make them feel 20 again. They want those things with minimal work involved and, consequently, they don't have much investment in their own care. This leads to people following physician orders blindly without question, and while most physicians are well-trained and this trust is accurately placed, there are some bad apples out there that do some real harm.

For what it's worth, Medscape and WebMD are actually pretty good resources for medical knowledge for laypeople - much better than Wikipedia. The ultimate source of medical knowledge is UpToDate - it's what I use as a quick reference - but it's blocked by a paywall and by no means written for easy comprehensibility by laypeople. The problem is that medical knowledge is not the end-all be-all for medical practice. I "learned" pretty much everything you can find in those sources by the end of my second year of medical school. Coming to me and telling me what you learned on Medscape/Wikipedia/WebMD isn't helpful, because these are things that I know. Unfortunately many patients don't seem to understand this. What you get by seeing a physician is their judgment and experience - their ability to apply that medical knowledge for your particular circumstance and given your particular history. Dr. Drew Pinsky of Loveline fame put it best (transcribed from an episode of the Adam and Dr. Drew Show podcast) following someone implying that WebMD is an acceptable substitute for medical advice:

“WebMD is just a bunch of... WebMD is just a bunch of inf... ok, this is - now you’ve really pushed my buttons. Cause you understand that WebMD is just a bunch of information, right? Information that we as physicians knew in our second year of medical school - second... year. Then we train for on average 8 more years - on average... 8... more... years to be able to apply that information by seeing it in real situations - developing JUDGMENT about those circumstances for your particular clinical circumstance. And then many people 10 or 20 years down the line have - they’ve seen THOUSANDS of these situations. So you go to your doctor not for what’s on WebMD - that’s information. You go for the physician to apply their judgment in that particular circumstance. It’s not about information. If it’s on WebMD, you’re just telling us the sky is blue - 'yes, we know the sky is blue.’"