Yep this is what I've come to understand. I think there are 2 types of doctor: the kind who deals with difficult decisions by outsourcing it to "trusted" authorities, and the kind who finds the time to investigate personally. I don't blame people for being in the first category - it takes a particular character, as well as the opportunity, to be able to research for yourself, and I think many doctors who might want to investigate personally have been swamped and just trusted that others are doing their jobs properly.

I think part of what is going on might be that we have a system which evolved to manage a public that was poor in information and time. Decision making processes weren't set up to be challenged from multiple random directions, and now that they are being, they can't process the challenges effectively and learn from them. To prevent total collapse and inability to make any decisions at all, I think they've just cut off and censored input channels that they aren't designed to handle.

That's the most charitable hypothesis I can come up with by the way - I have plenty of others which are less so :)