Law2Doc said:
Thus once you get into med school no one cares what your MCAT was, you cease to be the guy with 4.0/40 and are now the MS1 at JHU, etc. Once you get into residency, no one cares how you did at the boards or where you went to med school -- you are now a resident at say, Penn and that is what will be looked at from then on -- each step looks only to the prior. It's hard for a premed who is told that these numbers are SO important to grasp that in a year they will mean nothing, but that's basically the truth.
As for patients, I doubt the efficacy of the treatment dictates what they think of the doctor. Perhaps with surgeons, who fix things in the short term or not at all. But in terms of other docs, since many either don't get better or will get better on their own with or without medical attention, for this possible majority of patients, the doctor they are happiest with tends to be the one who spends the time with them and actually listens. Not necessarilly the most effective one or the smartest.
It seems like every one is focused on simply how these measures (i.e. MCAT, GPA, etc.) contribute to the
impression of competence, not the existence of it. I personally do not care what fellow docs think of my MCATs and GPA. What I am saying is that they do, indeed, measure qualitites that are important for a physician, though again, we are talking about a correlation, not strict causality (i.e. plenty of ****ty docs with a 40).
I'm sorry to say, but I have trouble believing that the efficacy of the treatment does not matter as far as the patient's opinion of it is concerned. This statement, unfortunately, is wrong prima facie, though I will acknowledge that the doctor's soft qualities are
most important in their opinion of their doc's efficacy, perhaps. Again, why are we measuring everything by the patients's self-report.
Finally, I have trouble believing that given an equal bedside manner between two physicians, I find it hard to believe that all of you, like me, would not choose a doc who scored higher on MCATs, GPA, USMLE, etc. Given equal soft qualities, smarter is better and we should also avoid the trend, like one poster mentioned, to assume that these qualities (compassion and intelligence, loosely) are mutually exclusive (but rather, we assume them to be for the comparison).