Web MD Me Please

I tell you, winter has a way of sucking.  Thank you cold, I appreciate you blowing into my ear and causing a very painful earache.  I solved this with a little bit of warm olive oil.  I heated it up and let it cool down before brushing it into my ear with a q-tip.  I really did help.  It felt better than the hot pad I'd had on my head since I got home.  This little ear pain has followed what I presume to be an infect salivary gland.  Two or three years ago, I had a very painful swelling of my throat.  It happened several times.  All times it hurt to even swallow my own spit.  I went to my primary care physician and they said: "I don't know, I'll take some blood.  Call on Monday if it hasn't gone away."  Really?  Wait four days with intense pain and HALF YOUR THROAT SWOLLEN SHUT!?!?  Did you just pay for and print that pretty piece of paper on the wall two seconds ago?!?  I had to go in again the next day because I was in so much pain.  They still said "I don't know," but this time they gave me a prescription for some pain medication. The next time it happened, it came and went within a day.  Of course, this wasn't enough time to get in to see the ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) as I had been advised to do.  He just thought I was crazy, stuck a camera down my nose and into my throat to appease me, and said I was fine.  Well, this last week, I had a bit of a tickle in my throat.  I just figured it was a minor cold and I could beat it with lots of hot tea and upping my intake of Vitamin D.  Well, in the middle of rock climbing this weekend, the pain got worse.  By the middle of our mall extravaganza, I was in so much pain!  When I finally got home and looked in the mirror, I discovered the reason for my extreme pain was not an earache, like I had presumed, but a swelling of my throat.  By the next morning, swallowing was very painful.  Advil every couple of hours and throat numbing lozenges really helped.  Today, I happened to be glancing at our practice's website and I noticed on our 3-D spine a gland that happened to be in the spot where I had felt the hard lump (on the outside) and that corresponded with the swelling on the inside of my throat.  Now, I did what every good physician fears their patients do:  I Googled said gland, the parotid (it's a salivary gland).  Pop.  Up comes WebMD with this little tid bit of information: "Bacterial infections generally cause one-sided salivary gland swelling. Other symptoms such as fever and pain will accompany the swelling. The bacteria are typically those found normally in the mouth, as well as staph bacteria. These infections most often affect the parotid gland."  The fact that it took me literally about 5 minutes to find something that matched my symptoms and the "look" of my ailment really has me perturbed.  I don't think the parotid on me is the one that is swelling, but a swollen gland in my throat due to bacterial infection makes more sense than anything else. Not one, but several physicians have sent me home without so much as a "I'll keep looking into this to see if I can help you more than by simply giving you a pain pill."  My mom even threatened to send me home with one of the doctor's if they didn't help me out.  She had spent from 3 in the morning to about 8 trying to keep me semi-comfortable by giving me some of the old pain pills from my wisdom teeth extraction.  Lucky for that doctor, that episode didn't last 5 days like it did the first time.  It barely lasted 24hours. Let me just say, if you have something that the doctors say "I don't know" too, feel free to google, come up with a list of possibilities, and then take it back to them with the challenge to prove your self-diagnosis wrong.  If they refuse to come up with one, you do it and have them start checking it off.  Did these people not take a Hippocratic oath?  Or did they just sign on the dotted line and are only considered an insurance monkey for filling quotas?