Why the hell do I learn more on here than from the doctors.
Frankly - most doctors have no experience with withdrawal from drugs. Some develop dependence during the course of practice, and as a result, lose their ability to practice medicine. Given that many physicians are the result of around 20 years total in either school or residency, there's not a lot of time to develop a dependence in ways that would go undetected. Folks that do get weeded out, some return to finish later, but it's simply not that common.
As a result, what they know about this stuff is what they read about, may be biased by marketing from drug makers, and is also part of a mindset that focuses on empirical objective observation as the way one understands a health issue. Much of the torture of withdrawal is not the objective measures of withdrawal (high blood pressure, tachycardia, or diaphoresis - for example) it's the subjective feelings of existential dread, complete loss in the ability to muster basic volition to do anything, or the lack of basic tools to know how to manage stress (since drugs are how we learned to cope with stress, take them away and you're dealing with a lot of bad shit without any real coping skills). Most of this stuff is common knowledge amongst us 'degenerates' - being a heroin addict taught me much more about how to help people than my years of grad school did after I got clean while at the same time, graduate education allowed me to earn that professional credibility and helped me to have a defined scope of practice/professional ethics etc.
Ultimately, we are in a time of infancy when it comes to people with lived experience being able to use those skills in a professional way. There is tremendous stigma around us, and our opinions/views/experiences - we are unreliable reporters in the eyes of establishment medical practitioners - but with a little professional credibility, you can have much more control over how people see you, what they're willing to listen to you about, and how much value they put on what you say. I have always liked that I can walk in two very different worlds and speak the language of either one fluently.