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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

#71

Post by alasdair_ »

paviva wrote: post #25

Compared to previous generations (and the change is quite steep -- I am talking about students today vs. students 5-10 years ago), a growing proportion of medical students have entitlement issues. Those issues are roughly two-fold : (1) feeling entitled to a "balanced" lifestyle; (2) feeling entitled to help people. The first one is obvious: student want to leave early, they don't understand that patients always come…

>"Mother Teresa Complex"

Wouldn't this mean simply telling the patient that their suffering is "God's plan" and refusing to treat them, nor give them any pain medication?

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

#72

Post by WhitneyLand »

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…

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

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

#73

Post by cloverich »

naveen99 wrote: post #67

> average acceptance rate for fall 2015 was 6.9 percent But most students apply to multiple schools. Actual acceptance rate is 40% across all demographics. https://www.aamc.org/download/321480/data/factstablea12.pdf Edit: also, 25% of the applicants are repeat applicants. So, first application acceptance rate is probably closer to 50%.

Though its worth mentioning that based on your grades, test scores, and even pre-med screening -- many students who want to be a doctor will never even apply.

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

#74

Post by Lordarminius »

cm2187 wrote: post #43

One thing that strikes me is that the medical profession is one of the only professions that hasn't industrialised. Basically one highly paid, highly trained doctor in front of every patient. It's a craft industry... It doesn't scale well, and it is very hard to maintain a consistent quality. Perhaps will AI change that...

> Perhaps AI will change that...

There are a lot of areas that I predict will be affected by tech.

Diagnosis will be made easier. At present for instance, many cancers are classified in a confusing and overlapping way. Radiologists might disappear in 50 years. Huge swathes of surgery will be automated away. I suspect psychiatry too will succumb.

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

#75

Post by vacri »

xanderstrike wrote: post #59
erentz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really work 90 hours? That's 13 hours a day 7 days a week. How does that even work logistically when you need to eat, sleep, commute, do laundry, shop for food, and hopefully also see family or friends on occasion.

I'm assuming it's 90 billable hours. He said he waited two hours to do a ten minute procedure, sounds like most of his day is spent waiting rather than working.

That's two hours that he can't be off with his family, reading a book, having a drink, learning to juggle rings, so on and so forth. It's definitely 'work', even if it is standing there twiddling your thumbs because you're waiting on colleagues.

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

#76

Post by wernercd »

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #64
erentz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really work 90 hours? That's 13 hours a day 7 days a week. How does that even work logistically when you need to eat, sleep, commute, do laundry, shop for food, and hopefully also see family or friends on occasion.

And get time to read articles on HN

What do you think he does in the 110 minute he was waiting to do the 10 minute procedure?

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

#77

Post by Gatsky »

cm2187 wrote: post #43

One thing that strikes me is that the medical profession is one of the only professions that hasn't industrialised. Basically one highly paid, highly trained doctor in front of every patient. It's a craft industry... It doesn't scale well, and it is very hard to maintain a consistent quality. Perhaps will AI change that...

From the outside it looks like doctors do fairly mundane things like write prescriptions, make diagnoses, counsel patients etc... But a doctor is not merely someone that does these things, each of which could be done (probably better) by a nurse, a physician assistant, a well trained monkey, or an algorithm.

The key thing doctors do is take responsibility for a patient. A recurrent neural network won't do that. Machine learning engineers won't/can't do that. Google certainly isn't going to do that. Doctors don't always or even often get it right, and they could always do a better job, but they are still the only ones really willing to take responsibility for a patient.

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

#78

Post by viraptor »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #72
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…

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 time and were much more happy.

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

#79

Post by hasbroslasher »

camerintinbun wrote: post #36
mmagin wrote: post #17

This is the important part, I think: "But one part of medical school culture has been especially hard to overcome: the stigma of mental illness. When they need help most, medical students in anguish rarely reach out. Students attribute this reluctance to seek care to fear of stigmatization by peers and to concerns over professional ramifications, particularly during applications for residency and licensing."

MD students aren't the only ones who have this issue either. As a PhD student in a medical research program, I have talked to several others who face these same problems. I experience it in my own thoughts as well. 4 years in, I have no social life, never meet anyone, don't really have the drive to do anything outside of work anymore, etc... I never remembered being like this from my previous jobs, but overall, I gen…

This makes me really sad. I hope you find your way..

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

#80

Post by catscratch »

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…

The majority of today's US med school students admitted in 2016 were born in 1992. They grew up watching the silly kids and stupid parents sit-com world of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon while getting soccer trophies for showing up. They wasted a lot of time playing non-educational games rather than reading or working hard to accomplish real things.

While they had to work incredibly hard to get into medical school, and it's harder than it's ever been, I feel like anyone born in the 90s or later is going to be at a disadvantage, because the level of stress is not only much higher than before but many just aren't prepared for the stress.

However, I think that because of this, medical schools will have to change. It's just too darn hard!

Getting real though: med school is f'ing hard. Reading this did not surprise me, and if anything, I was surprised that the writer did not know what he was getting into when he got in. The things he is complaining about are the same things I've heard for decades.

Also- the Helen Keller comment, while disrespectful to those that are hearing and/or sight challenged, made me laugh.

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