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I agree with your assessment on the current state of the US medical system, and unfortunately always needing to be your own advocate. I encountered a similar situation with my daughter's feet which pointed inwards from a very young age and affected her gait, causing issues with back pain when she got towards her teenage years. Despite taking her to multiple MDs (with good reputations) including her GP and orthos, they all said she was likely to grow out of it, and shrugged it off. It took a tremendous amount of digging and good luck to find a MD who specialized in gait analysis and knew right away what the root cause was.
She had been born with her femurs twisted almost 30 degrees which resulted in the ball and socket at the hip not sitting properly to overcompensate to keep her knee straight on the other end of the femur. Thankfully, he referred us to probably the top surgeon in the world for these types of procedures who was also local. He ended up breaking both of her femurs clean through (staggered operations so she didn't have to be in a wheel chair), aligning them properly, and holding them in place with a rod through the center of the bone and the two sections secured with horizontal nails that screw into the main rod to keep everything in place while healing the breaks cleanly. They'll be removed after around a year.
Quite an amazing procedure performed by a fantastic surgeon, and a great person...Without self advocacy on our part (or eventually hers as an adult), there is a very good chance she would have ended up never getting this diagnosed properly and resolved (and it would have caused major pain issues later in life; it's not just a cosmetic / gait issue).
That said, I suspect (as an amateur with a background in Biology/nutrition) that there was a good possibility the root cause of yours was actually a vitamin B-12 deficiency resolved quickly by the amount of eggs you introduced. It's very easy to wind up with one if you were pretty close to true vegetarian and weren't doing things to ensure you mitigated the risk. It's extremely hard for me to believe you were not getting minimum protein requirements with nearly any diet unless you were really just eating certain vegetables and no beans/lentils, rice, etc. That said, I'm also wildly speculating as I have no idea what your actual diet was. Just wanted to throw out B-12 deficiency as another possibility especially since it is pretty common in vegans in particular, that would have been another easy test for them to run (which for all I know they did, but again just speculating).
It would be interesting to know what your average diet consisted of as an aside, and apologies for getting off your main point, but it's an interesting case. Glad you got it resolved either way!