Even cooler is his about me mention of saving his own life https://mvakde.github.io/ > Saved myself in a medical emergency (doctors didn't know what rhabdomyolysis was)
I can't think of many ways that otherwise healthy and fit younger people can physically nearly kill themselves doing normal activity, so it kind of stands out - let alone it being not all that rare either. Rhabdo has even gone viral in the news like when a while back a couple of Chinese girls nearly killed themselves doing a social media 'squat challenge.' They did 1000, got rhabdo, didn't know what was happening, ended up in the ICU with kidney damage.
It also manifests in other ways too. For instance I had an elderly family member give himself rhabdo during a manic phase he was going through when he started going wild on construction and other physical tasks that were way beyond what his body was ready for.
Basically it's not some super obscure thing you'd expect only a good doctor, let alone a specialist, to know about.
Still, emergency doctors, especially in a hot place like India, should be aware of it.
but on an average, not great
Also, a lot of gymgoers and physical trainers I know hadn't heard of rhabdo either (and this is a relatively wealthy part of a tier 1 city)
things are changing for the better however
“Doctor.”
I loved the subject and nerded out about the course material - I spent my time designing my own experiments around gene cloning that took several semesters to run. They were sharing last year's tests with their frat buddies and laughing at us nerds.
I've never looked at doctors the same way again after college. I looked up to them as a child, yet after seeing how the sausages were made, I started to doubt everything.
I frequently ask doctors, who spend all of ten minutes with me while the nurses do all the work, about the molecular specifics of what they're talking about. They talk down to me as if they're explaining to a child, yet they're frequently quite wrong. I'm not trying to sound superior to them, but I'm shocked they seem to care so little about the subject. It doesn't give me much hope about what they know and their abilities or competency.
I suspect surgeons and specialists are a different breed and aren't like this at all.
And to be clear, this isn't everyone. But it does seem to be the majority I've interacted with throughout my life.
When they act disgruntled at patient interaction, I detest that their profession tries to cap the number of med students per year. We should be letting in as many med students as we can take. We should let doctors from overseas immigrate and easily become practicing doctors here in the US. We should provide easy paths for nurses to become doctors.
The premed students in my university were chiefly concerned about money and prestige. They drove BMWs gifted to them by their parents and laughed at what I drove and how hard I studied. I had to put up with their bullying for years. I know not everyone who studies to become a doctor is like that, but it permanently skewed my view of their profession.
Lol, what does this has to do with anything regarding aptitude or curiosity!?
This is a self defeating argument, because for it to work it requires that there is a larger number of people who love the field than the number of people who are in only for the $$$ (or else there will be even more scarcity of doctors)..
Which is not the case.
That itself is a good thing.
For it to also improve the motivations of doctors, all that needs to be true is that someone more motivated by money is more likely to be in the group that switches career.
It does not require the number of people that love the field to be a majority. Not that loving the field is a binary in the first place. People are a mix of motivations and cutoffs are arbitrary.
But you just pull this "more doctors than before" out of your ass. There is no such assurance. If less people want to become doctors, then eventually there will be less doctors, not more.
Let's attach fake numbers: Right now only 50 people can get residency each year, and 80 people starting college each year want to be doctors and would work hard enough. If you let everyone get residency, at first you'd make 80 doctors per year. This would decrease doctor pay and then only 75 people would want to be doctors, then 70. But if this ever dropped back near 50 for long, wages would spike back up, and the candidates would hit 80 again. It stabilizes in between, at 63.
With a bottleneck at X, and potential supply at Y, removing the bottleneck gets you a number between X and Y. All else equal, it can't stabilize below X. There will not 'eventually' be less doctors.
Alternatively don't even remove the bottleneck at first. Increase the residency bottleneck to 60. The number of potential doctors drops below 80, but it stays above 60, so now you have 60 doctors per year and the most money-motivated took a different major.
TL;DR: Let the number of residencies rise and the number of people that want to be doctors lower until they meet in the middle. Because residencies decide the actual number of doctors, meeting in the middle gives you more doctors.
There is no reason why it would bounce back at 50. What if it bounce back at around 20 and settle around 30? Then you have less doctors than before...
Supply and demand means any lower doctor production causes even higher wages and that draws in even more potential doctors.
By what mechanism would it settle at 30? In particular, if it would settle at 30 despite an even harsher doctor shortage, why is it not already at or below 30?
I do agree with the sentiment though that the US needs to fund more residency slots as it's an asinine professional barrier, and that we would benefit from more physicians coming from more diverse financial backgrounds.
Maybe self preservation?
In east europe, public hospitals will force doctors to work 36 hours shifts (overnight ER with theoretical sleep). Doctors have a full criminal liability for mall practise.