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I have heard that in other places outside the US, medical school is not hell, and it was made that way by the AMA which enforces a monopoly on how many MDs scho
by codexon 11y ago
I have heard that in other places outside the US, medical school is not hell, and it was made that way by the AMA which enforces a monopoly on how many MDs schools are allowed to graduate each year.
Whether or not this means doctors educated in the US are superior and make fewer mistakes than those that are not, I do not know.
- barry-cotter 11y agoI only know about Ireland, the UK and Germany. All of them have undergraduate medical schools and they're all really, really hard. But the competition to get in is intense enough and meritocratic enough that if you did get in you are fully capable of passing absent the emergence of mental health problems. The intern year is pure hell everywhere as far as I know but that's after you graduate even you want to qualify as a doctor. A year when working a mere 60 hours basically qualifies as a week off and people commiserate over the length of time they've gone without sleep.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoI've never found a reasonable explanation of why these long student-doctor hours are a) necessary or b) desirable. I've always put it down to the same thing as the parent, doctor's union's intentionally restricting supply to benefit their members at a great cost to society. Far more of the job could be done by nurses (or a computer), and given the choice between an experienced nurse and a tired and inexperienced doctor, I think the nurse may well win.
- barry-cotter 11y agoIf you can do your intern year you can do anything and you learn a great deal in that year. Doctors are legally responsible in ways that nurses aren't and compared to the average doctor the average nurse is an idiot.Then again given the choice between a nurse practitioner and a doctor who's been at work for sixteen hours who just qualified I'd take the np. All that said outside surgery the hours appear to be mostly hazing. Between lessened fatigue and poorer continuity of care reducing doctors' hours is a wash when analysing fatalities and medical errors. This does not hold for surgery. Reducing intern's working hours clearly results in more patient deaths in surgery. Feel free to check on google scholar.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoCan you summarize the conjetured reason why having your trainee surgeon getting enough sleep to do their job correctly leads to more deaths, I'm intrigued.
- GoodIntentions 11y ago>compared to the average doctor the average nurse is an idiot. After that statement, I'll assume you don't know what you're talking about or you're in some odd part of the planet where nursing is taught on the job. Around here, nursing requires years of training. Psych, biology, pharmacology and I don't know what. We have different level of nursing qualifications, with the longest being a nurse practitioner, capable of legally prescribing medication. It is a field regulated by the same governing body as doctors, and is not trivial in any way.