Certainly, seeing doctors in US and Canada was a lot more of a discussion and they expected you go off and do your own research and come back. Could have been the individuals, of course, but I found it a very different (and far better) experience.
That's a British attitude thing, historically doctors were seen as near god like creatures with immense knowledge.
The reality is quite different.
Managing your doctor when you go to see them isn't encouraged by that attitude and the fact we can go twenty thousand times until the right answer is hit on at random without anyone really questioning it... Where as the Americans in particular are handed a rather large bill for being there so are damn well going to make sure they get the right diagnoses at minimal cost, particularly
when the insurance cover limits what it'll pay out each year.
One of my friends qualified in Denmark, she was telling me that no matter what you have to manage the doctor, they are doing something for you, so you're in charge.
I've also heard similar from a long qualified Diabetes Specialist Nurse I used to work with, but he was a right dour bugger that had got into Nursing from being a Mechanic.
Oh and then there was the time my brother complained of some condition to the doctor. Doctor starts tapping away on his keyboard. After a bit my brother peers round at the screen thinking he's going to see his medical notes or something. No. The doctor was googling the condition.
The GP practice computer systems do have links to medical encyclopaedias in them in some form of other, but nothing says that because they have EMIS/Vision/Torex/Whatever is they have to use the one that is there. It's also possible that they looked at it and decided to find other sources to confirm that option... OR they saw the cost of the drugs that the practice system's encyclopaedia was recommending and decided to find out what other drugs are available.
The thing to remember is that GPs are basically general problem solvers;
Got something really common, easy they see it daily or at least weekly.
Turn up with something they see once a month, year, decade and they're digging into what ever info sources they have at hand; if it happens to look like something they see every week then a miss-diagnosis is almost inevitable.