I'm afraid I'm going to become dumber by only memorizing jargon for 2 years. Is there any critical thinking or problem solving involved in these first couple years? Anything intellectually stimulating?
If you find yourself memorizing lists and diagrams, and thats it, there is either a problem with you or your school.
If your school rewards pure regurgitation (what was slide number 3, second line, 4th word), then you chose the wrong school. Oh well. Nothing you can do about it. If your school starts putting out board-like questions (hinge questions), then you will begin to see just how much reasoning there is.
Its up to you to put things in the big picture. Integrate them together, see how they fit. Now, if you are in your first year, you are learning vocabulary. You have to crawl before you walk, walk before you run. So, yes, there is a great deal of memorizing. And yes, people who memorize well can be pretty decent physicians.
If you want derivation of equations and electrical engineering circuits, you are going to be very sad with medicine. If you want to be completely nebulous as to design the flow of a computer programer, you chose the wrong field.
But can you think of anything more cerebral, anything that requires more reasoning than working up a patient. To go from "I got a cough, doc" to "metastatic colon cancer"? Even if its something simple, like "I have teh gout, fix mees!" to "you have cellulitis, and you need antibiotics" is very challenging. People spend a minimum of SEVEN YEARS learning this clinical reasoning. Can you do it with just memorization? 80% of the time. and you're a decent doctor for it. But that's it. GREAT doctors are able to reason; they know the questions to ask, not the checklist a computer gives them.
There is more reasoning in what you're doing then you realize. perhaps you are simply too new to the game to realize it. Some schools foster creativity and expansion of the cranium with problem based learning, cases, etc. Some dont. Have faith that its coming.
