How stupid/smart can you be & still be US medical doctor?

In My Humble Opinion
1

US Medical school and the training required after that to become an actual practicing physician is generally noted for being academically rigorous and intellectually demanding. In my day to day activities in various service clubs and community organizations I know several doctors and in talking with them they are intelligent people, but not wildly better informed or full of more scintillating insights than the guy who has the computer services company, or the school principal, small bank VP, or the corporate middle manger at the same table.

So what’s the gatekeeping barrier for a US medical doctor? Do you have to be super good at math, obsessive about grades? What mental capacities allow some people to become doctors and others to flame out? Is there some secret path or “one stupid trick” where a person who was not all that smart could actually somehow wind up becoming a US medical doctor?

2

IANAMD, but have dated and know several MDs. My impression is that to be successful in medical training an individual needs to have above average memory, but not necessarily “smarts”(which is such a vague term that it is essentially meaningless). To the extent medical schools are very competitive, it naturally selects for individuals who did well in undergraduate science classes and who test well on the MCAT, which requires intellectual vigor.

In any case, I’m not sure why you would expect all medical doctors to be well informed – as Ben Carson demonstrated during the campaign, you can literally be a brain surgeon and yet be clueless about other matters.
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3

I think in a lot of STEM fields it could be argued that aside from being at least moderately more intelligent than average you also have to have a strong work ethic and be highly motivated to succeed, I’ve had many friends that were highly intelligent but just didn’t have that innate drive to look at the long-term and dedicate themselves to succeeding at something that took years of commitment to achieve.

4

I’ve always held the opinion that if you are admitted to medical school, you are going to be a doctor. The flunk-out rate is negligible, and rarely results from academic deficiency. And the criteria for admission to a limited number of places in medical school often depends on non-academic criteria. Like, who your family knows.

I can easily be proven wrong about this, and I welcome data that might do so.

5

Is it threadshitting if I say, “Ben Carson?”

I’ve also got a FOAF anecdote, about Registered Nurses who do not know how to figure proportions. “Change this mixture from four-to-one to only two-to-one.” “How do I do that?”

6

well Dr. Oz had to be pretty smart to become a cardiologist but stupid to believe some of the woo he pushes on his show.

7

Mrs. FtG sometimes worked in hospitals. The stories she could tell.

In particular: some doctors just didn’t wash their hand between patients! Yes, they lost more than average people due to “hospital” acquired infections. The head Pathologist who saw all this was powerless to do anything about it.

If you don’t understand germ theory, you aren’t all that bright IMHO.

8

I doubt if the ability to do social chitchat well is all that predictive of other abilities except for something like sales.

9

My father (a doctor) was fond of saying “remember, 50% of all doctors finished the bottom half of their medical school class.”

10

IANAD, but from what I’ve heard, on this board, it sounds like the key to most medical training is remembering a bunch of trivia: What’s the name of this gland? What are the symptoms of this disease? And so, theoretically, anyone willing to simply put in the effort for the rote memorization of names and symptoms could possibly qualify as a doctor. (Though I suspect that there’s more to it than that.)

To be a good doctor though, you’d really need to understand how all those parts go together, why that disease causes those symptoms, why this medicine cures it, why certain patients might be affected in different ways, etc. And you would also need to have a scientifically minded brain, coming up with hypotheses and figuring out ways you can perform tests to narrow in on a correct diagnosis.

The number I have heard bandied about, of doctors who fit within that realm, is I believe 15%. The other 85%, not so much. And most people rate their doctor on how nice he seems, rather than on his medical skill. So…if you’re looking for a new doctor, make sure to check their malpractice and complaints stats with the government, not their Google rating.

11

This.

I dated a doctor about twenty years ago. When I met her colleagues at parties and told them I was a mathematician, they sometimes broke into cold sweats and recalled that the two semesters of freshman calculus was the hardest time in their education.

I agree that the requirements for memorization are very high, but reasoning less so, even in subjects related to medicine. I recall talking with a neurosurgeon about an idea I had for a nutritional supplement for strength training, and he had trouble grasping what I thought was a fairly simple idea (and I have no training in nutrition).

At the other end of the scale, I know an M.D. who’s a researcher at Johns Hopkins, and scary smart.

12

I am sure that most people have heard this one.

Mechanic: I don’t see much of a difference between your and my occupations with as both of us either fix or replace worn out parts.

Doctor: Yes, but try doing it while the engine is running without it stopping

13

I have several friends whom are medical Doctors. For the most part I have been impressed with their common sense and logic as well as mechanical ability or at least mechanical logic. Overall the ones I know seem very bright.

14

Or even smarter to pass himself off as believing the woo that makes him money.

15

I was shocked once by a letter written by a neurosurgeon that looked like a C+ essay in Freshman comp. But I guess it depends on where you went to school.

I have two cousins who are doctors, and I lived with one during high school. She decided to be a doctor when she was 12, and never got a grade lower than and A after that (or probably before). She helped me with my homework, and got me through my science and math classes.

She went to Vassar, graduated Summa, and then went to Harvard medical school.

She is smart, but mainly she is a really hard worker. She never procrastinates. In fact, if she had to wait to do something, like when a teacher told her she’d have to hand in a paper at the end of the semester, but didn’t give her enough information to start it right away, it’d drive her crazy.

She does have a really good memory-- so do I, and so do our fathers. But she also has a high tolerance for boredom. Her mind doesn’t wander when she has to sit in a class that doesn’t interest her that much. She could stay focused on the larger goal of “I need this class for my medical degree.” I have a great deal of trouble doing that. She also can do math. I am lousy at math. I don’t retain it the way I retain other things. She isn’t brilliant at math, in the sense that she would probably have original insights, and could have gone into math or physics, but she finds the math necessary for medical school relatively easy. She even thinks lower math, like trigonometry, is fun. I really struggled with that, and wouldn’t have passed it without her help. If fact, I wouldn’t have taken it if she hadn’t been there.

My other cousin who is a doctor is also pretty smart, but he isn’t the smartest of his siblings (that would be his sister who has a Ph.D in microbiology, and is in Texas working on the vaccine for Ebola). He has the one thing in common with my other cousin (they are on different sides of the family) that they are non-procrastinators.

I think if there’s a “trick” to med school, it’s that you can’t ever get behind.

I know in college I never missed class (hardly ever-- I missed five classes total in four years-- not days-- classes), and I did all my readings. I never had to cram, except for one physics class that was a little beyond me. I had around a 3.5 most semesters, except when I took the physics class. I learned that if I went to all my classes, I didn’t really have to study, and that was just a state university, majoring in English. I never got behind, and I never struggled.

Staying on top in med school probably takes a hella lot more work, but if you do it, then you make it, and my cousins never get behind on anything.

16

My wife is a PCP, and as I was dating her through med school and residency, I’ve had the pleasure of social interaction with a fairly high number of doctors. This includes med school classmates that are in the ‘elite’ specialties as well as a many primary care doctors through the residency and work.

Every doctor I’ve met has been at least average intelligence, generally a bit above, but not too much. Some of them have been bordering on brilliant, but most haven’t, and it’s not really the key trait for most specialties. As others have mentioned, it’s a combination of memory, work ethic, and perseverance. You can be a doctor with 50th percentile smarts if you’re 95th percentile in the rest of those… and if you can combine it with a good communication style, you’ll be better at the job than most of the smarter people will be.

(My wife would probably agree with everything I’ve written, and would have some similar stories about my business colleagues. Some real idiots running some really large companies because they had the connections/money to get there. My 20s and 30s have included a healthy amount of disillusionment in the “person in X important job must be so smart!” realm.)

17

Surprisingly, mastery of medicine and high achievement in one’s chosen specialty/subspecialty are not necessarily correlated with critical thinking skills.

I base that conclusion on observing physicians who’ve gone on to high elective office, or who’ve attained success and fame hosting TV shows, running popular websites and/or writing books and drawing crowds on the lecture circuit. Many if not most were seen by their peers and patients as competent to excellent, but judging by the frequent nonsense they’ve spouted, you figure there has to be a massive disconnect somewhere.

Of course, you can say the same thing about PhDs, who overall arguably have a tougher path to their degrees and jobs. Notoriously, many Nobel Prize winners have turned out to be spectacular dumbasses outside their fields of endeavor.

So yeah, your internist or surgeon may not as smart as your local mechanic or CPA when it comes to politics or handling everyday affairs. Still, they’re probably a better bet if you need a workup for abdominal pain or a diseased segment of bowel removed.

18

In the US it’s harder to get into vet school than med school. Mostly because there are a lot less vet schools. Vets don’t have to do intern/residency but some do in special areas.

19

He was smart enough to fool Oprah. IOW, not very.

20

A doctor doesn’t have to be smart. He needs to have analytical and critical thinking and organizational skills, just like the the people Robert Persig described in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics”. A doctor is a mechanic who solves broken people and makes then run again. A doctor who is not that, is just a medical school graduate with a BMW and a sailboat.

Last summer, I arrived in Addis Ababa with bronchitis, which I had contracted in Manila. I had to go to a doctor for an Rx (no OTC antibiotics there anymore). I was driven to the ER, and saw the first doctor available, and he’s the best doctor I’ve ever had (almost – I’ve seen one or two other good ones in my life). My Ethiopian doctor had seen a thousand patients with bronchitis, and knew what it looked like, no bloated lab work… He asked me a dozen questions about medical history, and listened to my answers. He probed and palpated to rule out other causes of my symptoms. In short, he paid attention to my presentation and compartmentalized my data in the computer between his ears… He didn’t just hand me a lab order, look at the numbers on the test result, and say Here, take this.

The bill, in case you’re wondering, came to 25 bucks, including doctors consultation, a Saudi antibiotic, and a tip for my hotel driver. One very interesting thing: In the parking lot, in the dark, there is a table where a nurse checks blood pressure. This routinely gets done to every arriving patient, before they even get inside the building.

Was he a smart doctor? I don’t know, but more importantly, he was a wise one.

Those kinds of doctors hardly exist anymore in America.