Fluke

Your guesses might be right, but most likely you are talking about the questionnaires about your medical history and what's called the "review of systems".

In the US, medicare and most other insurances require those questions be asked every visit, however stupid that feels. Since your doctor may only get 10 minutes face to face with you, most of us will have an assistant or a paper ask those questions, so that we can say it was done but still have as much time as possible to talk about the more meaningful stuff.

Some places do it better than others. Usually, though, the form is hard to follow and photocopied to the point of total illegibility.

The best way to fix this is to cancel the appointment if they make you wait. If enough people did this the clinic loses money which should cause change. Unfortunately, patients are largely a captive clientele, having already waited months and canceled work and with few if any alternative providers.

The next best thing is much more realistic. Plaster the internet with reviews complaining of the wait. If your doctor (or more likely your doctor's employer) does not respect your time, let everyone know.

Many of the other comments are also correct. I have worked in clinics in government, military, academic centers, venture capital, physician owned, and even free community health centers, all in the USA. Doctors running late is going to happen. I've kept patients waiting while in the operating room, while telling someone they have cancer or are losing a limb, and by my burnt out underpaid government scheduler incompetently overbooking. I will also tell you that when I have at least a little control over my own schedule, I've never made a patient wait an hour, even with the above happening. It can be done, it just isn't because for decades timeliness has not been a financial incentive.

Make it one. Name and shame on google, yelp, zoc doc, wherever. Do it gracefully and sensitively, recognizing that there is a high chance the delay is not the doctor or nurse's fault. Done right, you'll do them a favor when their employer feels the sting of lost patients.

Here's a sweet video of a similar event in 2022, also taken by Perseverance. The article has some cool details.

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9172/nasas-perseverance-rover-captures-video-of-solar-eclipse-on-mars/

This is a cool point. I've never thought about that before. It's a very stable environment allowing for efficiency to be selected for in ways that may decrease adaptability.

Yeah. Countless examples going both directions. I wouldn't call crocodilians super adaptable, but they are so well tuned for their specific environs that they've been largely unchanged for 94 MILLION years.

I would argue that being warm blooded makes an animal more adaptable. Interestingly, it seems cold blooded reptiles evolved into warm blooded archosaurs which eventually led to cold blooded crocodilians. Tellingly, these active warm blooded ancestors are all extinct in favor of the passive, cold blooded, low adaptability ambush predator.

In the opposite direction, the adaptable rat has done much better than the countless specialized species that have disappeared since the industrial revolution and human explosion.

They get eaten