just wanted to vent about certain stupidities... I have a good friend who is incredibly smart, very hard working, and a paragon of a medical student. She also has a 240 + on her USMLE... She has wanted to go into family medicine since she first applied. My medical school is one of those upper crust, arrogant, stick up their you know what medical schools and they've been trying to woo her into a more competitive specialty just because they think she'll be wasting her intellegence on family medicine. I personally think that internal medicine, family medicine, and emergency medicine should be where the smartest kids are ushered, these areas of medicine need the best doctors and a choice of career in FM, IM, and EM should be respected, and in fact encourged! All respect to the optho and derm but they need to stop stealing the smart ones!
Somewhere along the same lines...how about a friend that was heading straight for med school, didn't do well on the MCATS, I gave her advice to do what I did to get into med school...she tells me she thinks of it as cheating to get in (getting a masters degree in a year, and as long as ending with a 3.0, automatic admission). Now all she does is drink every day of the week, stopped talking to her family, and can't get a job. Or, one of my other friends who did well on the MCAT, stupidly applied to only one school, got wait-listed, didn't get in, and didn't reapply the next year and is working as a something that has nothing to do with his degree. So frustrating!!! So I am venting about stupid friends...a little off subject, but it felt better to vent.
1. People who have a good shot at any residency they want usually don't look for the lowest paying fields. EM docs make plenty of money but if you look at the published surveys it's still well below the big timers. 2. You could easily make the argument that the "smartest kids" should be ushered into any field couldn't you? I mean, I want the dude cutting open my skull to have a pretty good head on his shoulders.
Being "smart" doesn't necessarily correlate with being a "good doctor". I've know plenty of residents with 230, 240, 250 USMLE scores who were absolutely horrendous doctors. True they were extremely knowledgeable, but when it came to making decisions, I often thought that their brains suffered from information overload. Some of the best residents in my class had USMLE scores of 200-220. They are motivated, pragmatic, and hard workers. I'm actually quite happy if Optho and Derm keep all of the defective "smart ones" rather than having to deal with them in my field.
Good residencies lists make the school look good. That's why you can't always listen to advisors, they usually have underlying motives.
...have never had very much correlation. Some book-smart people are good doctors, some are not. Some book-dumb people are good doctors, some are not. (bad combination) My med school hoped I would do Ortho. I look like an Orthopod, I guess, and I had good scores. I did EM and I'm glad I did. Now I realize all of those scores mean nothing, except I'm a little better at teaching med students and I occasionally pick up a zebra or two. I also end up expanding my differential inappropriately sometimes. I scan a lot of chests for PE. I look for Temporal Arteritis, and with a high suspicion I keep looking even with a normal ESR (depending on studies up to 20% of TA has a normal ESR). These may not seem obscure to all of you med students/residents out there, but when you work for awhile cranking out hundreds of patients, 50% of whom have no active disease and 49% have about 20 different Dx, it's easy to forget the zebras.
As someone interested in EM, I hope I'll be smarter than most of the admitting doctors. Watching one of the EM docs gracefully verbally beat the soon to be admitting doc (who doesn't realize it's happening) into agreeing to admit a patient was a site to behold.
