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.
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.
posted by Sentinel at
1:21 PM
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