this is true, but there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to equipping people with a skillset to diagnose and treat 100% of ailments.
the failure to recognize this (or care) is partly why we have problems in medical care cost.
Moderator Note
Rumor_Watkins, you’ve been cautioned very recently about not engaging in personal attacks in GQ. Don’t do this again. The next time it will be a formal warning.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Why do you think it is self-aggrandizing? I am not a medical educator or a doctor.
You may not like it. It may not even be a good thing, but it is true.
I recently spent several several semesters in library school. Learning facts and skills relevant to running a library was only a small part of the curriculum. Most of it was clearly mainly designed to inculcate the idea that libraries are important, and that being a librarian is something in which to take pride. If you do take pride in it, of course, you are likely to be a much better librarian than you would otherwise. Doctors have to learn a lot more actual stuff, but they are being socialized into the “doctor” role the whole time they are learning it.
It is the same for any other profession too. Lawyers have to learn to be proud of being a lawyer, despite all the nasty things that people say about lawyers. They have to learn how to behave like a lawyer, and have to internalize legal ethical standards into their value system. Reading law books does not give you that. Going to law school (usually) does. (And no, I am not a lawyer or a legal educator either. I am an educator of sorts.)
Why do you think doctors, and especially surgeons. have a reputation for being arrogant? They have been taught to be arrogant. To a considerable extent they need to be arrogant in certain respects to function well as doctors. (Certainly they do to be able to handle cutting living people’s bodies open, routinely and calmly. Most people, even if they have an excellent knowledge of anatomy, do not have the gall. Surgeons have learned to have the gall.)
[Thanks, Colibri.]
I thought the idea behind a GP was to have someone who could diagnose and treat the more common stuff, and otherwise know enough to tell you who would know more.
This all sounds a little ethereal. What kind of proof or cites do you have for (1) the notion that professional education is designed to change a person, her personality, and her value system in subtle and unsubtle ways (you might start by indicating what changes are actually intended); and (2) the accomplishment of these changes in a given program’s students.
and (3) that the accomplishment of these changes is impossible save a formal education program
Or perhaps there is a self-selection bias going on? I didn’t go to medical school precisely because I couldn’t handle the blood and guts. It never appealed to me to do so.
Question to moderator: How is calling a statement “self-aggrandizing” a personal attack?
Or, in some situations, the stones.
Sure…I don’t see why not. When I say you can’t be a good doctor with just book learning, I’m talking about the practical aspects of taking care of a patient. It’s not a comment on ability or motivation or anything else. I can readily imagine a self-taught person knowing much more about a topic–or set of topics–than a physician. It’s not as if we have some secret gift no one else has.
As a practical matter, it might be tough to get someone to take your novel research idea seriously; there is a certain aspect in higher education that is somewhat exclusionary–unfairly or not–to folks who didn’t climb the internal ranks via standard routes. FWIW a lot of good medical research is done by PhDs and various other professionals often much smarter than the average clinician.
I can spew information on how to fix cars, diagnose cars. But, I was never taught those things. I’m not ASE certified.
I am non-trained, or not-trained. I think they’re the same.
As far as the research, you’d have to teach yourself a whole lot of statistical analysis to evaluate what we already think we know and prove that your breakthrough actually meant something. Otherwise you’ll be just another quack hawking copper bracelets based on anecdotes.
Actually, interestingly enough- the people who tend to be arrogant and have the gall- they don’t really seem to “learn” that. They kinda have that attitude coming INTO medical students. Arrogant students make arrogant doctors. And you can still predict in a medical class who wants to be the Surgeons and Ortho guys pretty quickly. I mean, it isn’t the case for everyone- some people will suprise you with what they want to do career wise, and plenty don’t know yet what they want to do.
But there’s always at least 3-5 people that come in knowing EXACTLY what they want to do and EXACTLY what they need to do to get that position.
With females it seems to be Dermatology, and with the guys- it’s Ortho and Surgery/EM dudes who tend to have the bigger personalities that stand out.
Medical school didn’t MAKE them have that gall or cocky attitude, some of them just come IN like that. But if they get the job done, then they get the job done. :shrug:
[Moderating]
Give me a break. If you don’t understand that calling somebody else’s post “as big a steaming pile of [whatever] poo as I have ever read, ever” isn’t going to be taken as offensive, you shouldn’t be posting here.
If you are going to continue to post in GQ, dial it back a bit. Address other posters in a civil fashion. The purpose of this forum is to provide factual answers to questions, not to express your disdain for other posters.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
100% agreed.
I suppose my point was that in one sentence don’t ask called formal education “vastly overrated” and then, in the very next sentence, talked about “non-trained” persons “pass[ing] themselves off” (a term which can only connote imposture) as professionals. I was struck by the rapidity of the self-contradiction.
First question would be: What kind of doctor?
ER/GP - No. Too much of GP-ing is learning how to read the patient and figure out what they’re really talking about, in addition to their illness narrative.
Nuclear Medicine / Radiation Oncologist / Radiologist - maybe, to a degree. A lot of it is book learning, physics and pattern recognition. With a hell of a lot of study you could probably fake it.
Surgeon - Absolutely not. Real blood guts and gore look very unlike the books and its very dynamic. Only practice will serve.
Psychiatry - Maybe, to a degree. Psychiatry is as much an art as a science. Someone who had read a lot might be able to wing it for a while.
I do not say it has been consciously designed, not mainly anyway. Medical education has evolved a certain way over many centuries, and, since we still have a medical profession, since they mostly do quite well for themselves, and since they actually do seem to help quite a few sick people, I guess it has evolved something that works. (I am not saying it couldn’t be improved.)
Not having a medical education I can’t be too specific about how it is done there, but did you see the remarks in my second post about librarianship? I was taking courses like “History of the Book,” and even the course about library management included a major exercise about how we imagined (because nobody actually knows) how the library of Alexandria was managed. None of that really helps you run a library, but it helps you take pride in being a librarian. Also, not all of it is in the courses. A lot is more informal. Being around a lot of other students who want to be a doctor (or a librarian, or whatever) gets you into the feeling that doctoring is good, and important, and the that the way it is done is basically the way it ought to be done.
Anyway, do you really think that someone could go through all those years of work a doctor has to go through and not come out with their personality and values changed?
Why do you think junior doctors are made to work the absurd long hours they have to do? Is it because the medical industry is so much shorter of money than others industries that it can’t afford to hire enough people to cover the work in reasonable length shifts? No. It is because when you have survived that major hazing ritual you know that you damn well deserve to be a doctor, and you start to act like one. (Again, I am not saying it is the only or best way to do it.)
Anyway, I am not really saying anything very original here. I did not invent the concept of socialization. In fact, it is an old cliche: education is to build your character! (Military training is another form of education that, like all forms of education, is intended to build and mold your character, but in different ways and for different purpouses than a college degree.) A lot of people who should know this seem to have forgotten it, or to be unable or embarrassed to articulate it, but it is still true.
You, Kimmy Gibbler, as a big defender of the Liberal Arts, really ought to know this. Unlike medical or librarianship education, which do also teach you some useful facts and skill for the relevant jobs, just about the only purpose of Liberal Arts education (unless you are going to be a professor) is to make you, in certain important respects, a better person. (Part of that, often, meaning a person with leadership qualities, which is why college graduates are more likely to be hired into more responsible, better paying jobs.) It is also why it does not really matter so much that most people quite quickly forget most of the facts they had stuffed into their heads at college (or school). It was never really the facts that mattered,it was how undergoing the process of having them all stuffed in there changed you as a person. There is a broad social consensus that experience has shown that the sorts of changes that result from this are mostly good. That is why we have schools.
Again, I am not saying it always works, or that the gain is always worth the effort and expense, or that there might not be a better way if only we could think of it, or that some people, like Rumor_Watkins perhaps, are not already so perfect that they do not need it, but it is what education, qua education, is for.
Do you really want a cite? I don’t have one. But go to your library and pick out any general textbook on the philosophy of education. I am reasonably confident that should do it. Like I said, I am spouting cliches here.
I do not say it is impossible. It is conceivable that someone, through the accidents of genetics and random life experience, might spontaneously develop just the right personality and value system that would fit them to be a very good doctor. It is just incredibly unlikely, that is all.
And of course, they still will not get a medical licence.
And yes, I do not doubt that it is true that professions tend to attract people whose personalities are already on the way to being suited to it. I can well believe that already arrogant people are more likely than others to choose to try and learn to be a surgeon. (And quiet people are probably disproportionately attracted to librarian ship, and so on.) That does not at all contradict what I am saying. Just because the clay is already something vaguely like the right shape, it does not mean it could not use some more molding.Sorry to butt in, but I was going to ask for clarification on why **Rumor **was out of line, too.
From the Rules for Posting thread:
S/he didn’t say the person was self-aggrandizing or a pile of poo, s/he said their *argument *was. That seems like a pretty big distinction to me, and in line with the guidelines that are posted. If one isn’t allowed to insult arguments one things are stupid, especially in GQ, someone should please update the rules to explicitly reflect this.
Njtt, when you referred to a Liberal Arts education in your last post, did you mean the actual liberal arts major/degree, or just education in general in a liberal arts school, be it a physics major or philosophy major?
The latter answers the former. I actually have no interest at all in being in the medical field. I’m perfectly happy in my current profession. This is just a hypothetical. But I’m much more interested in the ‘why’ than the ‘how’ anyway. There’s no desire to cure or study disease here, just a curiosity of how much knowledge there is out there, and how hard it is to learn it by yourself.
This is what I’m looking for. It doesn’t really matter what kind. That’s sort of my question. Thanks for answering it. Guys, my question isn’t something like “Help me get into medicine w/o medical school”, it’s how vast, specialized, and difficult is the knowledge needed to be a doctor? Is it accessible to the layperson or is the top, say, 30% of the necessary info impossible to learn without a teacher, by one’s self?
I could teach myself astronomy and math pretty easily. I don’t really need anything but a few books to learn it. I could learn everything there is to know about the Great Barrier Reef or the Marianas Trench* from a book and become just as much of an expert as the professor of Wherever University.
But can I do that with medicine? If so, in what ways (Radiology, Oncology, etc)? If not, how close could I get (same as 4 years residency or just one year of premed)?
If I may expand my question a bit, I’ve read a lot on being a pilot and I’ve played MS Flight Simulator for years. Could I fly a plane? Almost? Not even close? If so, what planes?
- These two words are magical around here. Consider the floodgates open.