> Meanwhile, some doctors absolutely make contributions that scale, such as finding cures or vaccines, preventing spread of infectious diseases, or discovering

> Meanwhile, some doctors absolutely make contributions that scale, such as finding cures or vaccines, preventing spread of infectious diseases, or discovering ways to detect diseases earlier. and many engineers have invented machines that have saved millions of lives. Let alone the fact that most of the things you mention were discovered either by academics or pure science researchers. Doctors : Medical scientists :: Engineers : Physicists & mathematicians. Doctors aren't doing the inventing. They are applied practitioners of their profession. The sycophancy around worshiping doctors is one I can never get my head around. Sure, it is a difficult job to learn and an essential part of any system, but just being the medical profession doesn't give a doctor any moral high ground in their choice. Being in India, the biggest contributors to saving lives have been policy makers. Funding access to clean water, electricity and roads are far bigger life savers than someone who can do surgery. Google is probably saving more lives by letting doctors web search symptoms, than entire families of hospitals. I have no delusions about my work. I do it because I like it. I would still do it if it was live saving, or completely irrelevant to society at large. But, raising certain professions to an innate moral high ground makes no sense to me. Be it doctors, fire fighters, veterans or first responders. If a person needs continuous approval from society to do their job, then they should not be doing it in the first place. That being said, I will always give every honest job a minimum level of respect and appreciate both hard work and tenacity. So, I am not advocating for being an ass to doctors. However, I respect those values, not some innate virtue of their profession.