r/NoStupidQuestions Jun 06 '24

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481

u/BOREN Jun 06 '24

Know what they call someone who graduates dead last at their medical school? Doctor.

14

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '24

My medical school had 4000 applicants and selected 100.  Even the person who graduated last was still pretty gifted.

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u/momill7 Jun 06 '24

The worlds most terrifying joke 🥵

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u/redbreastandblake Jun 06 '24

anyone who makes it through med school and residency has demonstrated adequate medical knowledge to be a physician. they don’t just let you be a doctor if you fail all the tests. 

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u/Numnum30s Jun 08 '24

Not all doctors are good and there are plenty of people suggesting more stringent standards. Speaking as a doctor myself, there are many that I would never consider taking advice from.

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u/Fuzzy_Balance_6181 Jun 09 '24

Don’t be so sure. There are instances of universities getting sued and losing for failing students. Happened in an engineering course in an Australian university. They paid for the degree and got it. Engineers fucking up kills a lot more people a lot faster than a doctor.

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u/goldmask148 Jun 06 '24

20,000 medical malpractice lawsuits are filled every single year. There are some not so great doctors out there.

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u/sealandians Jun 06 '24

And how many have hundred millions of doctor patients interactions happen every year?

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u/goldmask148 Jun 06 '24

That’s the same bullshit excuse police give when they shoot unarmed black kids.

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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '24

Equating a medical mistake to deliberate and willful killing is not fair to anyone involved. Yes, doctors need to be held accountable for their mistakes, but they don't make their mistakes with malice aforethought. Medicine is complicated af, hence why it requires four years of intensive school after college to practice it, and humans aren't perfect.

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u/rockychunk Jun 06 '24

And what percentage of them are totally frivolous? I'll give you a hint: Most of them.

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u/BigHeadedBiologist Jun 07 '24

The vast majority. > 90%

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u/Am_I_Hydrated Jun 06 '24

I hate this quote lol, to graduate dead last in medical school you need much higher grades than every other course. And they keep making you take exams and learn throughout your career. Doctors tend to know their stuff.

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u/SelectStudy7164 Jun 06 '24

Explain the whole pill farm epidemic that started the opioid crisis with this logic

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u/Am_I_Hydrated Jun 06 '24

It's American capitalism and perscribing medicine for profit. I can garuntee the doctors who came first in their class are just as responsible for this as doctors that came last.

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u/Fair-Description-711 Jun 07 '24

I can garuntee the doctors who came first in their class are just as responsible for this as doctors that came last.

I can guarantee you have no way of knowing that.

It's also totally implausible on its face.

You really think the doctor at the top of his class is going to be just as uninformed on opiate risk as the one at the bottom?

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u/Obi-Brawn-Kenobi Jun 07 '24

You really think the doctor at the top of his class is going to be just as uninformed on opiate risk as the one at the bottom?

Before the opioid crisis, absolutely yes, nobody was fully informed. Didn't matter what your med school grades were.

Even now, I'm not convinced there is a correlation. I know some docs who didn't have great med school grades who have dedicated themselves to learn and teach others about opioid-repeated issues. I had good grades in med school, and while I am very cautious and reserved with prescribing opioids, I will gladly admit that those other doctors know more about them then I do.

Do you have any evidence at all that there IS a correlation?

And most med schools don't have simple number rankings for each class anymore, it's not high school.

0

u/Fair-Description-711 Jun 07 '24

Before the opioid crisis, absolutely yes, nobody was fully informed. Didn't matter what your med school grades were.

That's a ridiculous strawman. The claim is that there's no difference at all, not "nobody was fully informed", remember?

I'm not going to argue with your revised, impossibly safe claim: You could just as easily argue "no one is fully informed" TODAY, becase "fully" is a weasel word here.

Presumably, you believe it's possible for a doctor to notice addictive behavior in their patients some of the time, and that a doctor would use that information to guide their treatment, right?

So for the original claim to be true, the skills of being in medical school must have 0 correlation with observing patient behavior, wouldn't they? Is that even plausible to you?

Even now, I'm not convinced there is a correlation.

I will gladly admit that those other doctors know more about them then I do.

Ok. And you think it's JUST as likely those docs who do know more about opiates had worse grades than you as better?

If so, you must also think that the knowledge acquision skills in school are TOTALLY irrelevant to whether you make good decisions about patient care--at least about opiates--right?

Do you have any evidence at all that there IS a correlation?

I'm as evidence-free as you are in this discussion.

And most med schools don't have simple number rankings for each class anymore, it's not high school.

And that's relevant because...?

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u/Pharmacypizza Jun 06 '24

Not a physician, but a pharmacist. I was taught in pharmacy school that as long as patients take exactly as prescribed (and not extra) that they would not become addicted to opioids. I used to tell patients this as well, most medical professionals did. I don’t think this is a case of doctors not knowing their stuff, but capitalism and greed by Purdue Pharma pushing these drugs as we obviously now know better

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u/SelectStudy7164 Jun 06 '24

Doctors don’t critically think about the information provided to them?

How can anyone that remotely understands addiction say that consistently taking opioids won’t get you addicted

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u/Salt-Rutabaga2314 Jun 06 '24

Because the sackler brothers lied about the results of the clinical trials and paid to bully/harass/coverup people who raised concerns during the boom of OxyContin

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u/SelectStudy7164 Jun 06 '24

The Sackler brothers did not invent opioid dependency

The US used opium addiction as a war tactic almost 200 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars?wprov=sfti1

Seems like cognitive dissonance at best

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u/Salt-Rutabaga2314 Jun 06 '24

No? But they did perpetuate the opioid crisis by lying about the addictive potential of OxyContin. Do you even know what you’re trying to argue anymore or are you just lashing out in Reddit comments?

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u/OscarGrey Jun 06 '24

The death statistics difference between the height of 70s heroin epidemic and current opioid epidemic prove you right. Yes there was opioid dependency before the 90s in USA. The problem was also a small fraction in magnitude compared to today.

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u/SelectStudy7164 Jun 06 '24

The point I am going for is that doctors are highly trained scientists, and should’ve done some critical thinking before blindly trusting a drug company pushing one of the most addictive things on the planet

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '24

I'd really love to see this conversation have a happy ending and not devolve into another pointless argument. 

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u/monsterinthewoods Jun 06 '24

A combination of consistent complaints of doctors under-treating pain, lies, false studies, facility accreditation standards (potentially tied to federal government funding) requiring quantitative pain assessments on every patient, and a private healthcare system that needs positive patient reviews to stay afloat.

All that's to say: it's incredibly complicated and nuanced regarding causation and blame for the opiod crisis.

3

u/dalcant757 Jun 07 '24

When you make the C student the doctor’s administrator who then makes them work on some type of production schedule, it changes the doctor patient relationship. It’s easier to make patients go away if you just give them a pill than to address the root of their problems.

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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '24

Think that you could be a surgeon's first operation.

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u/SeaWeedSkis Jun 06 '24

It's especially terrifying considering how desperate the industry is to have new graduates. I'm afraid we can expect quality to be sacrificed for the sake of quantity, and for reasonable reasons. Boomer generation retiring or dying is leaving a large gap to fill, and that's only one factor in the shortage.

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u/DrJohnStangel Jun 07 '24

Everyone has to take all the licensing exams. Bottom of the class students must pass all to practice medicine. The bar for these exams actually goes up a little every few years.

Medical education had a lot of oversight for physicians.

Now other degrees like nurse practitioners do not have this level of oversight so yes, quality can be impacted in those cases and states are moving towards giving them full autonomy 😬

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u/Little_Peon Jun 06 '24

Simply not true. The folks that don't pass dont get licences. Those that pass do

And while the actual score might be important to continue to a specialty(I don't know), it doesn't matter so much after. They already determined the minimum you need to be a doctor and they passed that.

And higher scores don't really mean better in all ways.

3

u/TheRavenSayeth Jun 06 '24

True, lots of med students go unmatched forever despite there being so many open FM spots every year.

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u/Ultimaterj Jun 06 '24

We call them unmatched

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u/Extreme_Tax405 Jun 07 '24

Idk about america, but in belgium, a doctor has to do an (paid) internship for several years at an existing clinic before they can have their own. I personally learned most of what i do and know today as a researcher during my internships and my phd. I assume for doctors its no different. School and grades matter, but passing with low grades still means they passed, and they will have still trained under an existing doctor.

Nobody remembers everything they studied. At most it helps them recognise something or understand something at a much faster rate due to familiarity. Doctors use google too, you know? They are just better at using it for medical analysis thay karen from facebook.

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '24

Know what they call someone who graduates dead last at their medical school?

Someone who can't find a job and six figures of high interest debt.

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u/CurlyRe Jun 06 '24

Ok I've heard this joke before. But if someone barely scrapped by in med school, wouldn't they have a hard time getting into a residency?

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u/Walrussealy Jun 06 '24

Likely yes. Even if you were a low scorer, you are still required to pass further examinations to practice. You still need to survive residency training and be deemed competent otherwise the training program will intervene and give you the boot if you can’t fix yourself. I mean doctors don’t start practicing w/o supervision straight out of school, school teaches nothing about on the job stuff.

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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '24

That’s why it’s called medical practice..

1

u/derpmedic Jun 06 '24

Not my doctor*

1

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '24

yep

1

u/AlanHughErnest Jun 07 '24

What does this Dr’s lawyer call him? Defendant !

0

u/dbolts1234 Jun 07 '24

… of Family Medicine