The Incidental Economist

Mark please define poorly trained.

I know people who could not get into medical school who I think would make great MD’s. I know people who have practiced outside the USA who cannot get licensed here who I would go to.

And by the way, this is why doctor is such an unappealing profession in France. Since I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve gone through my memory and been struck by how, when I was in school, nobody asked if I wanted to be a doctor. As I understand it, the cliché is that a bright young middle-class kid will become “a lawyer or a doctor.” In my upper-middle-class background, no one even brought up the idea that I might want to be a doctor. Lawyer? Sure. Bureaucrat? Of course. Business executive? Why not.

Medical interns in France make less than the minimum wage per month (and therefore much, much less per hour) so if you want to become a doctor you had better have parents who can afford to support you into your late twenties. In the fancy prep school I attended, the only pupils who were thinking about becoming a doctor had a doctor parent. This completely scientific survey of some people I vaguely knew over a decade ago leads me to speculate that becoming a doctor in France has become sort of like contemplating a military career in both countries: a profession you might choose because of prestige/family tradition/passion but that has stopped being a smart financial bet and so draws on an increasingly narrow pool of applicants. Which is quite worrisome from a societal perspective when you think about it.

If the above is correct I assume that MD’s are less likely to come from as great a set of students in the USA and yet they do fine.

IMHO it is not so much the brilliance of the MD that matters but the systems.

BTW I had a very minor operation done in Honduras where it is much easier to get into medical school.

Something med school in Cuba:

The Latin American School of Medicine is a six-year program of study, which includes two years of basic sciences, three years of classwork and clinical rotations at accredited teaching hospitals, and a rotatory clinical internship in the sixth year. All classes are taught in Spanish; but a semester-long Spanish language intensive is offered to students who need it (prior to first year), along with a pre-med semester in which students can review pre-med sciences and improve their fluency in Spanish. All students study at the LASM campus for the first two years, and then go to another of Cuba’s 21 medical schools, which are located throughout the island, to complete their studies.

First, I would submit that we already have poorly trained doctors. I’ve run into a more than a few as a patient. However, I don’t think that’s a problem with the training requirements. It’s a fact of life in any profession.

However, we have already eased up on license requirements in many states. If naturopaths can treat patients, I would submit that their are really no significant standards at all.

Perhaps we should have fewer artificial restrictions and more reality based ones. For instance, do you (or can you) practice science based medicine versus magic based….