I agree with you, but I'm not sure most ped office visits give enough time to notice such things. We always had the "that's not normal" quote from the nurses, not the peds who didn't spend as much time and focused on the typical development questions.
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I've done a decent amount of time training in pediatrics for what I do and I think it would be ridiculously difficult to draw any conclusions from an office visit.
Good points, G3. I guess it wouldn't have mattered to me who gave me info -- the doc, the nurses, or even the wall of pamphlets in the room! I just wanted to be given some resource other than "wait until he's school aged." But I suppose the couple years of worrying that my child was going to be bored when he got old enough to be in school isn't really a horrible problem.
I guess when my then just turned 3-year-old was getting angry because he had to use the "baby" eye chart instead of the one with letters, I would have liked someone to point me to a resource to show I wasn't crazy in thinking we might have future educational concerns. We did get lots of comments from folks in the peds office and the ped allergist office about "kids don't usually do this/know this yet," so they were noticing unusual behavior. What was missing was a little follow-up of information. (granted, my kid is one of those who had more visible early verbal/reading skills - if his signs of giftedness didn't show up until later, the peds office wouldn't have noticed anything, and neither would I for that matter.)
