Which Doctor Do You Trust?

This is a very difficult question, and one which I intermittently get stymied by as I continue our GAPS journey. This week we began to have some competing advice given to us by our alternative doctor regarding when to start probiotics and what foods we should eat at this stage of our diet. Whose advice do I follow? Dr. Natasha? Or Dr. 'Alternative'? Hmm. I'm just not sure. There are so many competing voices out there today in the healthcare realm, and even as a trained nurse, it can get really difficult to decipher accurate information from mistaken information. Particularly when both options have medically plausible reasoning or physiological explanations behind them. The only recommendation I can give to those in our type of situation (those with a condition not typically addressed or cured within traditional Western medicine) is to do your research and make the best educated choice you can. Don't be afraid to intelligently 'tweak' a certain doctor's treatment plan if you have good reason not to follow their advice on a certain aspect of their care. Also don't be afraid to add something that you have good reason to think your doctor may be missing but that could have a benefit for you. No doctor knows everything. No one person's care plan is "the answer" to your problem. We live in a world of finite human knowledge, and the more I learn about the human body, the more I realize how much 'we,' humanity, don't know about ourselves. 

How do you determine when you have "good reason" to do this tweaking? Here's a few thoughts I've come up with so far:

1. Is there medical research to back it up? Scientific controlled studies? This is the best and easiest way for the average person to find out if a certain treatment recommendation is legitimate or not.
2. Is it based on commonly agreed upon medical knowledge of human anatomy and physiology/pathophysiology (I realize this one is a bit more difficult to discern for those without any healthcare training)?
3. Is it natural? What I mean by this is that our world and our bodies are uniquely and amazingly created to operate under normal conditions without unnatural human interference. For instance, scientists have tried to replicate many of the designs seen in nature, but without the same success, and sometimes even to our detriment. One example of this are the hundreds of synthetically produced vitamins and supplements on the market today that are supposed to boost our health; but as Dr. Natasha points out, our bodies have been designed to recognize natural vitamins and minerals in natural food form. So most supplements are actually never absorbed, and even if they are, our body doesn't know what to do with them in an unnatural form, so they get excreted in our urine as waste products. This makes sense, because we and our food are uniquely created and designed to work together, and these processes are so complex that they can't be adequately duplicated by scientists, even with all of our modern medical knowledge. There is simply too much we still don't know. So when evaluating health care options, I often ask myself, "How close to nature is this?" In general, the more uninvasive and natural it is, the more it makes medical sense.

References:
Campbell-McBride, Natasha, M.D. (2004, 2010). Gut and Psychology Syndrome. Cambridge, UK: Medinform Publishing.  p. 109.