First off, I find it stupid, but predictable that it takes an attention-seeking medical resident at Harvard reciting talking points he probably found over the past decade on SDN to finally have this reach mainstream. Also, while it's an op-ed, I feel like a stronger argument could have been made, but I guess the main points were communicated effectively.
Are Doctors in the U.S. over-educated?
If we define over-education as years of schooling, absolutely and I am not even going to entertain anyone who claims that the education we receive is necessary to manage an AKI. I have two issues with the over-education of US Medical Students and both problems are the fault of the US medical education system.
1.) The path to a US M.D. school leads to burn out and insanity. It starts now in middle school where you go to summer camps to learn about science and enroll in advanced math classes. It continues in high school where you kill yourself to get a near 4.0 GPA so you can attend a solid college. You take the SAT/ACT which at that time seems like the one thing that will determine the trajectory of your life. You put undue strain on yourself studying for advanced placement tests to get college credit. You emerge triumphant with your social, athletic, and academic accomplishments in high school to college where you are told everything you did in high means nothing. You slave away for hours in classes to keep that perfect GPA, find time to do activities not for your interest, but to please others, and to do research that you don't even care about. You sacrifice every summer to either do the aforementioned, take the MCAT which now seems like the test that makes or breaks your future, or apply to medical school. You come to medical school and its basically like a new beginning where absolutely 0% of all the skills you've developed over the course of the last 16 years matter and everyone starts anew. People who are good at memorizing or come from medical backgrounds pick things up quicker than others and based on one 8 hour test (which is really the test that actually determines the trajectory of your life...the other two were just whatever...) determine what field are eligible to practice for the next 40 or so years. It doesn't matter that you got a 5 on your all your AP exams and mastered differential equations in high school or submitted 5 publications as an undergraduate student and got an amazing SAT/MCAT score. Score below 240 on this one exam you take based only on 1 year of education out of your last 17 and you're probably not going to be that cardiac surgeon you dreamed of being when you were a kid.
2.) There is so much wasted potential. As U.S. trained physicians, all these liberal arts (history, writing, etc.), technical (computer science, applied physical sciences, etc.), athletic (varsity/collegiate sports), and creative (instruments, acting, etc.) we spent 16 years cultivating before medical school is dumped down the drain. Compared to IMGs, many U.S. medical graduates have far more to contribute to society in general . Many of us come from backgrounds outside of medicine and could write for the NYT, speak 5 languages, design software, and do other amazing things, but what medicine makes us do is forget all that. We're told to study non-stop memorizing useless minutiae or else all of what we did is worthless and then we slave away for 80 hours a week in residency and get old. Instead, medicine needs to find a way to utilize the other 16 years of education and apply it to patient care...or else we may as well be teaching second graders (because I guess you need first grade to learn how to read) that at elevated creatinine means someone has hurt their kidneys and that they either need to inject some fluid in their veins or give them a pill that makes them pee depending on how they look.