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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I do think that there might be too much regulation in medicine. It seems strange that someone should study for 20 years to learn how to perform the same operation on a specific human organ...

Most doctors tend to specialize anyway so why should a heart surgeon spend so much time learning about other organs which they're never going to sink their scalpels into?

Doctors are extremely well rounded these days, maybe they don't need to be. There are plenty of very good software engineers who never went to university, could it be the same for doctors; if we allowed it?

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I don't think "less" and "more" should ever be used when discussing rules, regulations, and laws. Only "better" and "worse".

As for "specializing" in a type of medicine, this is naive. The human body is not separated into discrete modules; every part is extremely interconnected to many others. Doctors must understand general medicine because treatment can effect all body systems.

Maybe you do need at least one person who understands everything to oversee treatment but does the person who actually does the 12 hours of precision meat-cutting need to be that person? I don't know, it's just a thought.

Master jewelers can do very fine work and handle lots of variation in the materials they work with but they don't need to know anything about the chemistry of gold in order to actually make the jewelry... They just need to know the right techniques and potential issues that can arise.

I would start with diagnosing and prescribing (possibly computer/statistics assisted) versus trying to tackle surgery first. I think you'll find that surgery is considered the hardest skill for a MD to obtain. Plus anyone getting cut up will want someone who REALLY knows what they are doing.

Most doctors tend to specialize anyway so why should a heart surgeon spend so much time learning about other organs which they're never going to sink their scalpels into?

Because everything is linked?

That makes sense and it's the same as software engineering. That's why you have a product manager/generalist to coordinate the different domain experts.

Most surgeries these days require a team of doctors already so doctors are already capable of working together with divergent skillets... Maybe there is no harm if these skillets diverged just a little bit more.

Maybe if there was more focus on communication skills as part of training, it would be better.

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