I really, really don't think that's true. Most people are not able to do this, and most of those few who could don't want to put themselves through it.
And then separately, how many people would trust a self-taught diagnostician?
And then separately, how many people would trust a self-taught diagnostician?
Most people don't have to be able to do it, just more than are allowed to do it now, but a factor of say 10.
Furthermore, I don't think people would necessarily need to go through med school and residency.
It's like building a website. There's probably some parallel universe where programming requires certification and only a handful of schools have it. It requires doing MITs SICP as the intro course. Requires compiler construction courses, algorithms, theory of computation and complexity, etc... And then a 4 year apprenticeship with other programmers. And then you can start building webpages, if that's what you want to do.
But we live in a world where it is open and so there's instruction available at many different levels. Would you let someone without a PhD in CS build your website? Of course you would.
And then separately, how many people would trust a self-taught diagnostician?
I trust my car mechanics diagnosis despite the fact I have no idea what level of education he has. But I'm fairly certain he's not an ME from MIT or Berkeley. With good self-study tools, I think that one can self-teach in specialized areas and achieve good mastery rather efficiently. I could imagine Khan Academy for Radiology taught by JHU and Harvard professors to be quite good.
You have got to be kidding me. How would this work for surgery? There are no short cuts to medical competency.
Sure, some of what I do is self-taught, I read books and articles, attend conferences, and complete Continuing Medical Education requirements. But I am able to do this because I attended medical school, then spent five years sitting less than a foot from experienced radiologists while they worked and answered every question I had.
The argument here is that medical boards are too rigorous, and test things that do not matter practically.
To give a ridiculous example, if a medical school required you to climb Mount Everest before becoming a doctor that might result in only 1 person becoming a doctor per year. However that scarcity isn't proof that climbing Mount Everest is needed to become a doctor. Nor is it proof that cutting out that requirement will provide significantly worse doctors than previous.
Additionally, in many things we need quantity more than we need extreme compentancy. For example when cut, its better to have some kind of treatment (e.g. first aid, stitching) rather than waiting for a surgical specialist.
Bright and determined baby-boomers became doctors and lawyers and accountants. Today smart and determined people aren't even going to college. The HN demographic is a perfect example of this.
I might argue that going to college is no longer necessary for the purpose of learning, because the material is so widely available. Even though I think that's true (for some fields), I still wouldn't advise people not to go to college because of the signaling problem (which one then has to sidestep by starting their own business or by contributing impressively in open source, etc).
I get hyperbole for the purpose of making a point, but if you go too far, you come off sounding a bit incredible.
Of course you don't need to have gone to MIT, etc to build a website. The room for error is just many many orders of magnitude different between that and radiology. There's a reason you don't generally hire self taught code monkeys to build software with real-time or life-ensuring requirements.