Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal • Hacker News Board

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#151

Post by epmaybe » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:23 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #56

dnautics wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? Every patient is exposed to a surface area that comprises several doctors. Currently my father is hospitalized with a failing liver and kidneys. He sees a GI doc, a liver doc, a kidney doc, an anaesthesiologist, residents for each of these, an intensivist.

I had more the generalist model in mind, as many small problems could certainly be dealt with in a more automated way. But the example of your father is illustrating my point. All these professionals each individually has to stay up to date on all the developments in their profession. And you hope they were not bottom of their class, barely making the exam. For complex medical problems, algorithms are unlikely to do…

As a medical student, I bring the AI future up a lot. For some reason, my fellow students immediately assume I mean general AI, where it somehow assumes all roles of a physician.

What I always try and explain to them is that there are definitely solvable problems in subsets of medicine like dermatology. Sure, it'll probably take 20 years before there's any traction, but there's no reason to completely dismiss the idea either.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#152

Post by epmaybe » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #51

drcross wrote: post #4

Many people want the status associated with being a doctor (of course some are pushed that direction by parents and some also just want to help people). When you have an abundance of people trying to get into an industry the profession have the ability to only choose the absolute pinnacle of talent. It's the same with being a pilot. Many of them work long hours in shit conditions for years hoping to get a decent rout…

one of my ex girlfriends broke up with me because I dint get into a medical school and her parents, both of whom are doctors, didn't want her to get involved with someone who isn't a doctor. Strangely( Or not strangely) that kind of 'made sense' to me back then, Indian community and all. Her whole life was geared towards her becoming a doctor. Things like volunteering purely to make your med school application look s…

Completely agree. Sometimes I have to take a step back and wonder what reasons my fellow students are actually in school, me included as an Indian male encouraged to go to medical school.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#153

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #51

drcross wrote: post #4

Many people want the status associated with being a doctor (of course some are pushed that direction by parents and some also just want to help people). When you have an abundance of people trying to get into an industry the profession have the ability to only choose the absolute pinnacle of talent. It's the same with being a pilot. Many of them work long hours in shit conditions for years hoping to get a decent rout…

one of my ex girlfriends broke up with me because I dint get into a medical school and her parents, both of whom are doctors, didn't want her to get involved with someone who isn't a doctor. Strangely( Or not strangely) that kind of 'made sense' to me back then, Indian community and all. Her whole life was geared towards her becoming a doctor. Things like volunteering purely to make your med school application look s…

[deleted]

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#154

Post by epmaybe » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:32 PM UTC

ReallyAnonymous wrote: post #21

medical school is humbling and difficult. Being a physician is difficult. I finished medical school in 1996 - didn't find it ridiculously hard, but then again, studying a lot was what I did in my youth. Now, I'm 47 years old, and work about 90 hours a week as a surgeon - I laugh when people say that we make too much. All I know is that 25 years ago, you had to be in the top 10% of your class to become a surgeon. When…

The thing is, medical school doesn't have to be insanely difficult. I've heard courses taught extremely well that made things like neuroscience a cake walk, and poorly taught courses like dermatology become very difficult due to the mindset I had while trying to study.

Why there's this dichotomy when there are clear examples of how to educate medical students 'right', I don't know. Maybe it's better for medical students like me to forget trying to go to class when there's poor quality teaching and try and learn it on my own. Or maybe in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter because the real education comes in residency.

My undergraduate degree was also in CS, did you ever feel like you wasted four years of your undergraduate education just to go into medicine later? I'm trying to position myself in such a way that I still get to use those sorts of skills after medical school, but I forget much of what I thought I knew, and the field changes constantly. L

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#155

Post by epmaybe » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:32 PM UTC

ReallyAnonymous wrote: post #21

medical school is humbling and difficult. Being a physician is difficult. I finished medical school in 1996 - didn't find it ridiculously hard, but then again, studying a lot was what I did in my youth. Now, I'm 47 years old, and work about 90 hours a week as a surgeon - I laugh when people say that we make too much. All I know is that 25 years ago, you had to be in the top 10% of your class to become a surgeon. When…

The thing is, medical school doesn't have to be insanely difficult. I've heard courses taught extremely well that made things like neuroscience a cake walk, and poorly taught courses like dermatology become very difficult due to the mindset I had while trying to study.

Why there's this dichotomy when there are clear examples of how to educate medical students 'right', I don't know. Maybe it's better for medical students like me to forget trying to go to class when there's poor quality teaching and try and learn it on my own. Or maybe in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter because the real education comes in residency.

My undergraduate degree was also in CS, did you ever feel like you wasted four years of your undergraduate education just to go into medicine later? I'm trying to position myself in such a way that I still get to use those sorts of skills after medical school, but I forget much of what I thought I knew, and the field changes constantly. L

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#156

Post by TheGreatPotatoe » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:55 PM UTC

stephencanon wrote: post #140

mixmastamyk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what end? It's well known the body has Unless they get paid by the hour, I see no reason to continue to participate in such a system. Still, it should not be allowed when lives are at stake.

There's no other path to becoming a doctor in the US. You can choose to go into a specialty with more relaxed hours, but you need to go through residency no matter what. If you want to be a doctor, you put up with it, like the generations before you. A sufficient number of residents organizing could do something about it, but (a) no one has time to organize when they're working 90 hour weeks and (b) there's a signifi…

The patient hand-off problem is real. I just feel like there is a better solution than having these folks work 80+ hours a week.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#157

Post by maxxxxx » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

bcook wrote: post #116

maxxxxx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe you can work 90 hrs/week and not have your performance and judgement be impacted.

Maybe his performance and judgement are so impeccable that even after a 90-hour work-week he still operates better than the average.

I hope you are kidding! On the other hand I wouldn't put it beyond the surgeons I have met to think that way.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#158

Post by WhitneyLand » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 1:04 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #78

WhitneyLand wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to work 90 hours a week? Why wouldn't your employer just offer a position with less hours for less money? In software the long hours have specific reasons. For example we can't double throughput by doubling resources, and in startups the money is limited, etc

> In software the long hours have specific reasons. Yes. Bad management and artificial marketing deadlines. You can't double the throughput in some cases by doubling the resources. (in some you can) But you don't have to work in the kind of environment that expects it. I got pulled into the environment that expected long hours once. Then the manager got replaced - throughput stayed the same, people started leaving on…

You're right those are also reasons. Unfortunately they're difficult to quantify. If there were an objective way to measure quality of management things would be vastly easier.

For example if a trusted management quality metric was reading "sucks", it would be easier to leverage change.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#159

Post by elboru » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

rifung wrote: post #7

jimmywanger wrote: post #3

I see parallels with medical school in tech hiring. They put the students through hell because that's what they had to go through, and they're rent seeking. In most other countries, doctors don't have an accreditation board. Most things are simple, and it doesn't require years of school to set a bone or put in some stitches, or even diagnose the flu or pneumonia. Similarly, you don't need a rockstar or ninja to write…

I have a friend in med school and his experience doesn't sound like tech hiring at all. From what I can tell, med school isn't hard because of rent seeking, but because there is frankly just a very large amount of things you have to learn in a short amount of time. They also have to work extremely long hours on certain rotations. I was shocked at how little sleep he could get on some days. On the other hand, he seems…

You described the exact same problems med school students have in Mexico, I used to think that was just a thing in my country, it's amazing how little they sleep since the beginning and how they have to keep doing it for years, depending on what specialization they have that could mean 5, 10, 12 years.

Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal

#160

Post by stephencanon » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 3:19 PM UTC

TheGreatPotatoe wrote: post #156

stephencanon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no other path to becoming a doctor in the US. You can choose to go into a specialty with more relaxed hours, but you need to go through residency no matter what. If you want to be a doctor, you put up with it, like the generations before you. A sufficient number of residents organizing could do something about it, but (a) no one has time to organize when they're working 90 hour weeks and (b) there's a signifi…

The patient hand-off problem is real. I just feel like there is a better solution than having these folks work 80+ hours a week.

You can hire twice as many residents and make residency twice as long so they get the same total training at 40 hours a week.

You'll have to significantly increase resident salaries, and allow residents to move between hospitals to deal with life events. This isn't impossible, but it's politically infeasable while everyone is talking about cutting medical costs (total pay to residents would need to go up ~10-fold for this to work out). It's a bad situation today, but there isn't a simple magic wand to fix it with minor changes.