Letter to an Aspiring Doctor

In practice, living the years I have with my wife, the answer seems to usually be "assume that you, as a doctor, have much more knowledge about your patient's experience and that because no test you know how to do dings 'yep, a problem', that the patient in fact _does not_ have a problem, that their claims of being in enough pain to want to die at least a few times a week are made-up, that they've lived this long with their 'must be just in their head' problem that surely it's not so bad and they can keep doing so".

From a purely probabilistic standpoint, they might be right.

From my wife's perspective, they are torturing her, hopefully not to death.

What _do_ you do?

But we are men of ethical scruples. I've dropped out of multiple grad programs due to witnessing academic fraud committed by students and professors working in tandem to keep money flowing into administrators who believe it is their utmost responsibility to perform a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values until a hauntingly extreme vices become considered virtues.

If I picked the medical profession, it would be because it would be so motivating to me to work in a highly motivating high-stakes environment where finding the moral thing to do is not so everloving exhausting.

Then have a statist regime begin to intimidate and relentlessly attempt to suborn you into destroying the voice of your conscience and the essential goodness of the caring profession is utterly lost.

After leaving a university just a few credits shy of a degree due to learning that university administrators have knowingly destroyed the value of their degree by handing out 50% of their CS degrees to people the professors consider completely incompetent, I was not tempted in the slightest when the university attempted to bribe me with a full scholarship for their Ph.D. program and a guaranteed tenure track teaching job.

Why the hell would I want to perpetuate the scam of a completely decadent educational husk? I am terrified that misuse and/or ignorant design of the internet is threatening our social health; it is destroying the quality of people's education in return for monetary "profit". EDUCATION IS PROFIT IN ITSELF, money is merely potential energy that may help or hinder us toward enlightenment.

So this is why our "education" system is actually a "maleducation" system: universities as founded were dedicated to making the best possible people, but they are now committed to making the most possible profit.

Of course, I didn't really know the background of the platform, so who knows what the author really intended. Likely, this is an instance of writing phrased in such a way that the reader can project their own views into it.

> Moreover, though we pay lip service as a society to diversity and tolerance, we increasingly demand uniformity. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine argued that doctors should not be permitted to opt out of performing procedures that they considered unethical on the grounds of con­scientious objection. Once the profession, guided by ethicists, had decided as a whole that something was ethically permissible, no doctor should be allowed to go against the consensus. This, of course, would have the corollary that mass murder by doctors would in theory be permissible, or even obligatory. Never mind: It can’t happen here. But what was once unthinkable can become thinkable very quickly.

The emphasized section above shows that his point is about overriding the moral judgement of individual doctors with legal fiat. In my mind, the risk is not just the law will someday mandate doctors participate in mass murder. Rather, that by eroding the judgement of doctors in the present, people who tend to think for themselves will self-select themselves out of the profession all together.