Bwaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Of course not!
I think Shagnasty (and others) answered this (it takes considerably longer to earn an MD than 4 years), but I’d like a little clarification: So in England (and elsewhere?) after Highschool (or whatever you call it) you can go directly into Med school, and in 4 years get a Bachelors of Medicine? What else do you have to do to practice medicine?
You normally go directly into the course from high school (as is the case with all degrees - nobody ‘majors’ in anything, you study a single subject outright from the start), and a medical course typically lasts six years rather than 3 or 4 for regular undergradute degrees. See Medical school in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia
I am not a doctor, but on my first cruise, we had the opportunity to hear someone on the loudspeaker ask “Is there an anesthesiologist on board? If you are an anesthesiologist, please come down to the medical bay on Deck 1. Thank you.”
Not long after, the ship made a detour to disembark the patient in Miami… we were 3.5 hours late returning to Orlando and missed our plane.
In most of Canada, a student can enter medical school with 2 years of undergrad completed (along with certain prerequisites), though most end up getting their Bachelor’s before getting accepted. In Québec, it is possible to enter medical school after Cegep (generalised college, grades 12 and 13) if you have astounding grades and meet the rest of their criteria, but again, most students end up with a couple of years of bachelor’s done, if not the whole thing.
How do they pick who gets to go to medical school that early?
In the U.S., some students work hard to get into college and usually enroll at age 18. The specific undergraduate college or university isn’t quite as important as some think for this purpose. Students get into medical school from a wide range of colleges with some not being very prestigious. What is important however, is the core pre-med curriculum and how well students do in those. They are designed to be quite difficult with some of the lower-level classes designed as “weeding out” classes to stop students that might not be quite dedicated, hard-working, or talented enough to make it through medical school.
By the end of the 2nd year of college, the actual medical school applicant pool starts to solidify but that isn’t all. There are still plenty more prerequisite classes to take and a rather grueling exam called the MCAT that retests all the prior material in the senior year and provides a common benchmark for all U.S. medical school hopefuls. Given excellent scores on the MCAT and almost impeccable grades in the prerequisite classes, students apply to medical school, interview all over the country and probably get rejected from most of them. The really qualified students (but not all of them) will get accepted somewhere.
From there, it is four more years maybe living far away from home and racking up $100,000 or two in debt. After medical school, there is a multi-year period of residency so students won’t be fully qualified clinicians until their late 20’s or even older for some specialties.
(I didn’t go through medical school itself but I did go to a graduate program and had to take some medical school classes so I got a rare opportunity of seeing it first-hand from an outsiders view).
I suppose my question is one of logistics and philosophy. We don’t expect students to commit to medical school until they are 21 or older and many medical schools have slots for people that are much older. How did medical students in other countries commit to something like that so early, how do they prove they are qualified, and why does the U.S. require so much more in the way of pre-qualifications?
How they pick, I can’t answer. I can tell you that if you’re not planning it out by the time you’re 16/17, you’ve got problems. Getting into medical courses is highly competitive at this stage, and (AFAIK - this isn’t my area of specialism) the expectation is that this clears out a lot of the chaff.
You’re right, a lot of it is a philosophical stance, maybe not completely unrelated to the way we’ve always had single-subject approaches to all degrees. But if we’re realistic, in neither situation does somebody become a fully-practicing doctor until their late 20s, so the end result is comparable.
I been thinking about taking some classes down at the local community college and getting an Associate’s Degree in Neurosurgery. I hear them neurosurgeons make good money.
Undergrads aren’t outside academia?
Doctor from Latin “docere”: “to teach”. It’s an academic title, not a medical one until comparatively recently.
I have a Ph.D. and agree that comparing it to an M.D. is like comparing apples and oranges. I actually hate the comparison. From what I hear, the original “doctors” were people with doctorates, i.e. researchers a hundred years ago, but they adopted the more scholarly “Professor” nomenclature. IMO the term doctor when applied to a medical doctor means literally to “doctor” someone, or to treat their wounds. So calling a Ph.D. “doctor” and an MD “doctor” are two separate words. The irony of it all is that some medical doctors believe that Ph.D.s aren’t real doctors.
So in answer to the OP, IMO an MD is just the term we chose to represent those who doctor others medically.
Odd. I see the MD and the Ph.D. to be on the same level, but just for a different set of skills.
No, but as anybody who has treated patients and taught will tell you, “dealing” with patients is entirely different than “dealing” with undergrads. I think it’s muchmore similar process with veterinarians though.
How recently? I understand that citations for “doctor” meaning physician date back almost as early as citations for “doctor” meaning one who holds the academic qualifications necessary to teach in a university. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the OED handy.
Here’s what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say about it:
As carterba said, the original doctors were senior members of the Church, and though there may have been some research component to their activities, “original research” in the modern sense was not (on the whole) a major component of the title. The first doctoral degrees were for doctor of divinity. So if we’re going for original meaning, neither the MDs not the PhDs are “real” doctors, only the DDs.
JRB