9 ms·

Thanks for sharing this! I went to med school for two years in my home country, married to a doctor who is in her residency training in the US and couldn't agre

• wutbrodo 6y ago
  > contrary to the popular belief in the US, doctors can be fairly un-intellectual. The main requirement to do well in their career is to rely on rote memorization (go check out on YouTube how Anki is so important/popular among med school people). I agree with everything in your comment, but this is one of the most important ones. This is actually the basis upon which my cocky little 17-year-old self decided he wanted to study math instead of medicine, contrary to the pressure my family was exerting: the idea of turning my brain into a file drawer was somewhere between horrifying and nauseating. I point-blank asked my brother-in-law at one point (he was around ~30 at the time) how someone as intelligent as him was satisfied with going into a field as unchallenging as medicine, and he was on exactly the same page as me: over the course of his medical education (started the same year as my sister), he also got an MBA and has started on a PhD, because being a GP would be immensely dissatisfying to his intellect. If you have a sense of yourself as fairly intelligent, it is _absolutely crucial_ for your health as a patient interacting with the healthcare world that you internalize that doctors aren't necessarily that smart (though of course, some are!). This isn't an insult! Most professions are filled with people that aren't that smart. But putting yourself blindly in the hands of an imagined omniscient without being an informed and opinionated advocate for yourself as a patient is foolhardy and dangerous, and you'll quickly discover the costs, if you're self-aware enough. If you have a doctor who buys into the God Complex and scoffs at the notion of a patient having an opinion, then you're double-fucked, and should definitely get a new doctor. This can be a delicate balance, and the doctors I know are quite fairly annoyed at the patient who does his own research (often poorly) and argues with them on the basics. "Knowing what you don't know" is an important part of being informed. Just 1) find a doctor who understands his limits and 2) approach the conversation as a meeting of mutually-interested peers logically discussing a problem (your health): one who has substantial headstart on the intimate, sometimes-inarticulable details of the problem, and one who has a substantial headstart on general research that's relevant to the problem.
  • pc86 6y ago
    > over the course of his medical education...he also got an MBA and has started on a PhD, because being a GP would be immensely dissatisfying to his intellect To put it charitably, it seems unlikely that while in medical school someone can also complete a full-time two-year business program and start a doctorate. But taking the comment at face value... There are plenty of specialties much more challenging than family med (which is what 99.999% of GPs do for residency). It's one of the least competitive and least well-paid specialties. This is why most of the med students who don't match end up scrambling into family med, because those are the (toxic) programs that have unmatched slots. If you don't own the practice you'll be lucky to break $200k cash comp without a post-residency fellowship. Infectious disease, pathology, and radiology are much more challenging intellectually and any surgical residency, including ones that you don't typically think of surgical like OB/GYN are similarly challenging. Hell, if you're in it for the money gynocologic ongcology and neurosurgery both have median cash comps well over half a million a year. > Just 1) find a doctor who understands his limits and 2) approach the conversation as a meeting of mutually-interested peers logically discussing a problem (your health): one who has substantial headstart on the intimate, sometimes-inarticulable details of the problem, and one who has a substantial headstart on general research that's relevant to the problem. I'm not a "peer" with my doctor because whether it's rote memorization or not, they've got at least 7 years of training I don't, and much more if they're a specialist and not a GP. You do not have a "substantial headstart" on any research relevant to your problem unless you've had it for years and are seeing a new GP just to get a referral to a new specialist. In which case, honestly, your old specialist can probably just refer you somewhere else. This doesn't mean doctors know their limits, I've heard some absolutely boneheaded nonsense out of GPs who got out of their lane - my favorite was a 70 year old, borderline morbidly obese physician telling me not to do back squats below parallel because "it will destroy your knees," and he subsequently groaned when he stood out of the chair. But that's in the same vein as going into a GP because you've had bad headaches for the last two weeks and approaching it as a "meeting of mutually-interested peers."
    • wutbrodo 6y ago
      > it seems unlikely that while in medical school someone can also complete a full-time two-year business program and start a doctorate. If you're very ignorant about a topic, it's probably a good idea to do thirty seconds of Googling to make sure a claim is actually implausible before you accuse someone of lying. MD/MBA programs exist that add 1-2 years to one's med school[1]. On top of that, "over the course of his medical education" quite explicitly doesn't simply mean "in med school", unless for some bizarre reason you don't consider one's residency (and possibly fellowship) years to be part of one's education. Lastly, and I can't believe I have to explain this, _starting_ a doctorate doesn't actually take any time. In the limit, it takes one Planck time[2]. > I'm not a "peer" with my doctor because whether it's rote memorization or not, they've got at least 7 years of training I don't, and much more if they're a specialist and not a GP. You do not have a "substantial headstart" on any research relevant to your problem unless you've had it for years and are seeing a new GP just to get a referral to a new specialist. In which case, honestly, your old specialist can probably just refer you somewhere else. You've entirely missed the point of my comment. You seem to think that doctors are equipped with future-tech Neuralinks to personally feel the day-to-day manifestation of every one of your symptoms and Black Mirror-style grains to review your entire life history and extract the parts which may be relevant to your medical issue. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they're not: for any non-trivial medical issue, doctors have the difficult task of compressing the entirety of your life into the data that are relevant to your current condition, and doing so in a very short time. If you think that they're capable of doing this without active participation from you, then I pray you never have any medical issues, because you are going to have a very bad time in the healthcare system. > There are plenty of specialties much more challenging than family med Yes, obviously. Part of "know what you don't know" is realizing that the complexity of some medical issues means that the "general technical knowledge" side of the scale is weighted heavier than the "intimate insight into the specific problem" side of the scale. I'm not suggesting that one starts arguing with an oncologist about which course of chemo they should be on. But then, I'm pretty sure that was obvious to everyone reading my comment who _didn't_ write a response constructing a series of towering strawmen. [1] https://freeman.tulane.edu/academics/graduate-programs/double-degrees/mba-mds https://freeman.tulane.edu/academics/graduate-programs/doubl... [2] I'm not a physicist, this is an attempt at a lame joke, don't @ me