Intellectual Stimulation?

[Wylde]

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Hello,

So, please tell me I'm wrong. The more I learn (and hear) about becoming a doctor the more I get a little turned off. It seems like physicians basically just regurgitate information and don't really do much hard "thinking" (thinking is the wrong word, i just can't articulate what my brain is saying atm)? Medical schools seems to be all about memorizing information instead of hardcore intellectual analyzation.

Maybe a phd would be a better path for me? I was reading the psych forum and people were talking about how some of their classmates came up with some amazing research etc. It seems like there is more room for intellectual creativity with a phd?

Please tell me I'm an idiot, I know I'm making some generalizations though.

 

[dd128]

Hello,

So, please tell me I'm wrong. The more I learn (and hear) about becoming a doctor the more I get a little turned off. It seems like physicians basically just regurgitate information and don't really do much hard "thinking" (thinking is the wrong word, i just can't articulate what my brain is saying atm)? Medical schools seems to be all about memorizing information instead of hardcore intellectual analyzation.

Maybe a phd would be a better path for me? I was reading the psych forum and people were talking about how some of their classmates came up with some amazing research etc. It seems like there is more room for intellectual creativity with a phd?

Please tell me I'm an idiot, I know I'm making some generalizations though.

You're an idiot, haha, no I'm kidding. Ask and ye shall receive.

There is an incredible amount of memorizing and regurgitation. Unfortunately that's the nature of the beast in med school, you need to learn a lot to be an adequate doctor in the world today. Though, it's not like you're going to be memorizing stuff and taking tests the rest of your life. There will always be learning as a physician, but that'll be just as true if you get a phd in some field. I'd say there's an incredible amount of room for creativity in medicine. Look how far things have gone in just the last 10-15 years. I remember my aunt got the primitive form of lasik surgery back in the early 90's with a scalpel!

New procedures pop up at an incredible rate improving on existing ones, only because of the creativity and ingenuity of doctors in their fields. If physicians just followed the same procedures they always did, we'd be going to hospitals sick, only to have the demons removed from us by drilling holes into our skulls. Or maybe having leaches stuck on us to "remove the bad blood" 🙂

 

[TheMemoirist]

You're an idiot, haha, no I'm kidding. Ask and ye shall receive.

There is an incredible amount of memorizing and regurgitation. Unfortunately that's the nature of the beast in med school, you need to learn a lot to be an adequate doctor in the world today. Though, it's not like you're going to be memorizing stuff and taking tests the rest of your life. There will always be learning as a physician, but that'll be just as true if you get a phd in some field. I'd say there's an incredible amount of room for creativity in medicine. Look how far things have gone in just the last 10-15 years. I remember my aunt got the primitive form of lasik surgery back in the early 90's with a scalpel!

New procedures pop up at an incredible rate improving on existing ones, only because of the creativity and ingenuity of doctors in their fields. If physicians just followed the same procedures they always did, we'd be going to hospitals sick, only to have the demons removed from us by drilling holes into our skulls. Or maybe having leaches stuck on us to "remove the bad blood" 🙂

Well put.

Of course there is room for creativity in medicine. You may not be able to get creative in medicine until you've undergone years and years of education, but once you've gotten the foundation built with a firm grasp of the basic science and clinical skills, then you're free to be creative--as long as you always have the patient's best
interests in mind.

 

[fireflygirl]

I completely agree with TheMemoirist. I think in order to get to that creative point you have to go through the basics first. You wouldn't even know how to be creative in medicine if you didn't know about all the details that go into your chosen specialty. Even at the PhD level, you are bound to do some unceative work like looking under a microscope for hours on end or repeating experiements. Even the greatest researchers spend, sometimes, years doing dull and uninspiring things before they get to the point where their creative ideas can be brought to the surface.

I have to take a moment to give an example of creativity by mentioning my father. He is a solo practioner in Family Medicine and some people talk about how FM is not as cool as a specialising or that you don't earn enough money. After being in practice for about 15 years my dad decided to get creative and integrate more services into his practice. He built a separate wing to his practice that now takes care of minor emergencies and has hired a strong team to take care of patients 24/7. Essentially he has created a one-stop shop for his patients' needs and they love him for it. In addition, he has certain values and rules about the practice that would be considered unnecessary or time-wasters in other practices, but they keep patients coming to him for generations. He has built his practice for the last 20 years from a few hundred patients to over 10,000. The local hospital has been eyeing his practice for years and my father refuses to give it up to them. And honestly, there's a big draw for me to join him in a few years - he has taken his practice beyond what most FM practitoners do and even at 60, he truly loves what he does. Who wouldn't want to work with someone like that? 😀

So once you get some hardcore experience and knowledge under your belt, the sky is the limit. There is plenty room in medicine to be creative and go beyond what your given specialty may dictate. Just keep that creativity in the back of your mind for a few years, until you can bring it out.

 

[TheMemoirist]

I completely agree with TheMemoirist. I think in order to get to that creative point you have to go through the basics first. You wouldn't even know how to be creative in medicine if you didn't know about all the details that go into your chosen specialty. Even at the PhD level, you are bound to do some unceative work like looking under a microscope for hours on end or repeating experiements. Even the greatest researchers spend, sometimes, years doing dull and uninspiring things before they get to the point where their creative ideas can be brought to the surface.

ditto. hence the popular phrase: "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." with regards to endeavors like science and medicine, I'd say that creativity is generally worthless if it isn't supported by some foundation of reason/evidence, etc. at the same time, however, creativity is absolutely essential to keeping the profession moving forward.

 

[PeepshowJohnny]

I agree with what the people above have stated.

Does medicine require huge amounts of memorization? Absolutely. However, that's not the end. Every specialty has its situations where presentations are unusual, treatment of diseases conflict, and there's always room for improvisation.

Take for example, gallbladder surgery. Surgeons can do hundreds of them and do them in their sleep. But last semester I saw a surgeon who had been in the field 20+ years get excited about a gallbladder surgery, because he was removing a necrotic one in an unstable ICU patient. Ask any ED doc for their war stories and they'll all tell you about the time they diagnosed a heart attack or a pulmonary embolism in a patient with a goofy presentation.

There's also the issue of being clever about non-medical things. On my medicine rotation, we had a patient who it seemed was going to be stuck in the hospital for almost a week due to issues with disposition and gettting her support at home, even though she was medically stable and just taking up a bed, bored. Myself and another student were able to suggest a plan that got her out of the hospital two to three days earlier by doing something simple and rearranging the order in which she was having her procedures done. That even got me a special recognition from the attending.

 

[puchi]

Yes docs spit out tons of information in terms of practing medicine, but not everything you see is in a book, those are the moments when you need to use your critical thinking.

 

[xrevision]

You memorize what you learn in textbooks because someone else has covered THAT particular part of the problem for you. If you really think about it a textbook, like my biochemistry text, has maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of research behind it. It would take you more than your lifetime to "intellectually analyze" what researchers have done for you.

 

[nevercold]

You memorize what you learn in textbooks because someone else has covered THAT particular part of the problem for you. If you really think about it a textbook, like my biochemistry text, has maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of research behind it. It would take you more than your lifetime to "intellectually analyze" what researchers have done for you.

Great way of putting it! You have to memorize all the details just so that you can *BEGIN* thinking about the patient...

Guy comes in with shortness of breath every time he walks. You have to think about the differential for shortness of breath, think about which questions to ask, think about how to use those answers, which physical exam findings to expect, which tests to do to answer each question you're left with. You ultimately don't just memorize the details, but learn their meanings and their associations so that you can use them more effectively. In fact, I would argue that there is so much to memorize that you simply cannot do it. Instead you have to start synthesizing the information into thinking networks in order to retain it.

When you learn a new language, you don't just memorize vocab lists--you do the memorization part but then you put it into practice to understand the interplay between connotation and denotation and the idiomatic ways the words are used. Ultimately you forget the original list but remember the language.

 

[metalmd06]

The thing about medicine is that it is very dynamic. There is CME and new things to learn all the time: New procedures, new methodology, new tools and new science. Regardless of whether you feel the information you learn in medical school is just meant to be regurgitated, once you become a doctor you will be continuously learning throughout your career. I know from hands-on experience and personal observation that the art of diagnostics requires a detailed thought process and logic, even for the most simple ailments. Maybe you should look into medical schools that employ PBL in their cirriculum? This style focuses on problem solving using real cases and science amongst groups of students. No matter what, however, due to the frenetic pace and mountains of material, you will be forced to remember and regurgitate a lot of material. Good luck!

 

[Wylde]

thanks for the thorough responses!

 

[etf]

the practice of medicine is shockingly analogous to the medical school admissions process. neither is formulaic, although it would be easy to think it was. getting into med school is more than the numbers, but without the numbers, you don't stand a chance. similarly, in order to be able to practice medicine you have to be able to draw upon a well established fund of knowledge, but there's a lot of interpretation/reasoning/decision making going on, which is why there are surgical robots but still no robots that can perform surgery unaided.

 

[dienekes88]

This is the exact same thought that Sandeep Jauhar had. Read his book "Intern."

I swear I don't work for the publishing company.

 

[paranoid_eyes]

i think (im not a doctor so i have no clue) that it works like this:

doctors have to memorize TONS of information. probably more than any other professional. But the interesting thing is, once you have memorized all that information, you have to synthesize/process that memorized bank of information and apply it to unique scenarios. It's probably true that a computer could honor it's way through the first two years of med school. but the clinical application requires thinking.