Doctoral disillusionment?

I've recently had cause to be disabused of the notion that doctors (the medical kind) are kindred spirits in the scientific fraternity. I'd always kind of assumed that they were a specialised branch of the science faculty, much as engineers are, but recent discussions have left me with my doubts. I chatted to my friend Chris about it , and Chris, now in his final year of med school, having transeferred out of an elec. eng. master's programme, replied, "Well yes, if you mean that their discipline is rooted in 300 year old alchemy, then sure, doctors are scientific..."

Jokes aside, I thought about it a little more rationally: doctors are highly trained and deeply studied in a very specific body of knowledge, and need to be able to consistently and accurately apply that knowledge on a daily basis. Reasoning and brilliant powers of deduction are not requirements (though of course they may be present in any given individual). Let's follow this train further. Why, then, are the entrance requirements for med school so friggin' high? Is the system poorly designed? I mean, if you don't have to be brilliant for medicine, and yet you require ridiculously high grades (far higher, for example, than chemical engineering or applied mathematics), where's the logic in that?

Let's think about this. Obviously there is some serious dedication required for the job, so you do want to make it hard to get in. You want to be assured that you're getting the best possible people for the job, given that these people are potentially sitting on a literal knife-edge between life and death. But what do high exam marks, particularly at a school level, really imply? To get high marks in high school you need to study very diligently, absorb and retain a great deal of information and consistently and accurately answer questions based on that information. Understanding of the reasons for that information are not so important. These are not university-level exams which may require critical analysis and or well-reasoned essays. In their chosen profession, doctors will be presented witha set of symptoms, and need to recall the conditions which fit those symptoms. They may need to order a test to verify the most likely ones. Finally, they would normally need to recommend a course of treatment based on the diagnosis. But they don't need to design that test. They don't need to be creative in their solution to the condition - there is a test which fits a diagnosis, you need to recall it and also recall all the information around it, such as possible caveats due to interference and reliability issues. The treatment is generally prescribed, too (if you'll excuse the pun). So the ability to get excellent grades at high school probably is indicative of someone who has the potential be a doctor, but perhaps not for the reasons that are generally assumed.

In the long-run, the assumption probably helps too. A lifetime of doctoring is a long and very demanding path, and self-doubt is a massive hindrance to being able to continue in that course. Society needs doctors, and it needs doctors to perform as well as possible. If that requires that they have a certain level of god-complex, so be it.

Spring hath sprung...

Spring is in the air.

At least, that was the unavoidable impression yesterday. We drove out to the Helderberg Nature Reserve for a picnic lunch with Christina's family, and the birds and bees were communicating their messages with unusual vigour. No sooner had we parked and started to set up that we saw two tortoises getting frisky. Tortoises! Frisky! Those words don't even belong in the same sentence! But there they were, quite literally banging away. In the end, the female was less than enthusiastic and stalked off (at full tortoise pace) to the bushes.

But it went on all day! We took a stroll around the pond, watching all the weaver birds energetically building their literal love nests, bumble bees in abundance, flowers blooming all around. We sat on the pier and watched the red dragonflies, when a turtle swam out from under us and glided gracefully through the pond weeds. Ducklings chirped excitedly as they paddled along behind their mothers. The turtle returned ... followed by another. It appears that turtles like to frisk underwater. Who knew?

Afterwards we stopped at the beach at Strand for a stroll along, well, the strand. The sun was shining, the water was freezing, beautiful. It really is a splendid place, the beach - especially for kids. So much potential for getting them interested in the world around them, and introducing them to the wonders of science. The physics of the wave action and the lunar tides, the splendid plethora of biological diversity... wonderful. Christina found a little cone shell which she put on her hand so that it could cruise around on her palm. It extended a long and inquisitive... proboscis? Well, let's hope that's what it was. Spring was in the air...