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

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

#111

Post by M_Grey »

deelowe wrote: post #84
chriskanan wrote: post #16

My wife finished medical school a bit over 4 years ago. While she thought medical school was brutal, it was comparatively easy compared to the challenges she faced in residency (she did her prelim at UCLA-Harbor and is now at Boston Children's hospital doing pediatric neurology). 80+ hour work weeks are the norm, and sometimes she works 14 days straight and has a pager that beeps throughout the night that she must re…

As a father whose young son had a compound fracture recently and had to wait in the ER for 3 hours to get it patched up by a grumpy, rushed, and tired ortho, this is horrifying. Something really needs to be done about current crony capitalistic US medical industry.

The solution is automation.

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

#112

Post by stevendhansen »

gnu8 wrote: post #95
pjlegato wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that capitalism as such has much to do with the problem you describe, as anyone who ever went to a Soviet emergency room will be happy to tell you.

The Soviet healthcare system suffered from underinvestment due to their command economy's focus on heavy industry and military production. The problem in the United States is the exact opposite: unproductive overinvestment due to the proliferation of waste, fraud, rent-seekers, and all other types of interests that rake a profit off the top without contributing anything to patient care. It seems like a false argument…

"our radically capitalist regime"

Citation required. I'd venture the US is more accurately described as a hybrid socialist / mercantilist regime than a capitalist regime.

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

#113

Post by frozenport »

catscratch wrote: post #97
frozenport wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this sarcastic, but I think its important to point out that much of the challenge and stress of US medical school is self inflicted by the current culture - and leads to bad health outcomes for patients.

My point was that medical school culture hasn't changed. It's been brutal for years. The main difference between those going to med school and the 90s and now in my opinion is a mix of the expectations by students that the increase in level of difficulty should be comparable to the transition between high school and college, or college and graduate school. It's not, and it never was. High expectations have always bee…

There is little evidence that hazing leads to better outcomes. Nor, does making medical school technically difficult leads to better outcomes. The US takes longer to train its medical professionals then most other places leading to more expensive care, and a overall deficit of doctors.

As somebody who works with pathologists, I don't find the academic part of medicine more difficult then say physics - but the pay is substantially different. This artificial labor shortage is protected by the systematic failures discussed in many of the HN comments.

None of these things are defensible.

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

#114

Post by jmde »

M_Grey wrote: post #111
deelowe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a father whose young son had a compound fracture recently and had to wait in the ER for 3 hours to get it patched up by a grumpy, rushed, and tired ortho, this is horrifying. Something really needs to be done about current crony capitalistic US medical industry.

The solution is automation.

... and/or deregulation (reregulation?) to open up competition. Often if not usually, the same task could be just as skillfully by done, or even more skillfully or appropriately done, by someone with a different educational route, with or without training beyond what is now typical (e.g., NPs, nurse anesthetists, PAs, optometrists, psychologists, pharmacists, RNs, you name it).

PAs provide an instructive example, but there are many others of different sorts. Often, PA schools have stricter prerequisite experience requirements, and PA students often take the bulk of their courses with the MD students, and have maybe a semester less of courses, before clinical training. So the end effect is that a PA's actual experience is often the comparable to an MD's after a couple of years of practice. Hospitals and health care systems know this, and have been gradually replacing MDs in many areas with PAs because they're cheaper but provide similar care.

We can't afford to maintain this fiction that the only way to have something skillfully done is by the MD training model.

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

#115

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

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

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

#116

Post by bcook »

maxxxxx wrote: post #115
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…

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.

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

#117

Post by thatcat »

stevendhansen wrote: post #112
gnu8 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Soviet healthcare system suffered from underinvestment due to their command economy's focus on heavy industry and military production. The problem in the United States is the exact opposite: unproductive overinvestment due to the proliferation of waste, fraud, rent-seekers, and all other types of interests that rake a profit off the top without contributing anything to patient care. It seems like a false argument…

"our radically capitalist regime" Citation required. I'd venture the US is more accurately described as a hybrid socialist / mercantilist regime than a capitalist regime.

The US seems more of a militaristic-mercantile regime when you consider the way the budget is allocated. Sure US has progressive taxes that are pretty high, but no single payer health care, outrageously priced education system, and few social safety nets - all indicate a low level of "social ownership over means of production" which is a defining characteristic of socialism.

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

#119

Post by aianus »

logicallee wrote: post #105
jimmywanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with medicine being hard. I'm not going to get into the difference difficulty between learning medicine or computer science. I guess I should have mentioned my point first, which is that just like you don't need a star computer scientist to write an app for a restaurant, you don't need a doctor with all that training and theoretical knowledge to diagnose a sprained ankle. I'm sorry about your conditi…

Regarding the rarety of my condition, it's diabetes treated with insulin, so not rare by any stretch of the imagination. With a positive diagnosis and in a fairly uncomplicated case, it's a huge burden on me to learn just the single condition. Now imagine doctors who don't have to deal with only a single, well-diagnosed condition. You say that a "sprained ankle" is easy to diagnose -- but is it really? On the differe…

People are being forced to go to an expensive doctor and pay for things that should be free or extremely cheap.

A few things I've personally witnessed: going to the doctor for a sick note, going to the doctor for routine travel immunizations, going to the doctor for a birth control prescription, going to an optometrist for routine eye correction prescriptions.

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

#120

Post by carterehsmith »

M_Grey wrote: post #111
deelowe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a father whose young son had a compound fracture recently and had to wait in the ER for 3 hours to get it patched up by a grumpy, rushed, and tired ortho, this is horrifying. Something really needs to be done about current crony capitalistic US medical industry.

The solution is automation.

Yup, we just need a startup that makes Robotic Surgeons and Nurses. Easy peasy.
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