Originally posted by Phar
Thanks for the responses.........After reading the posts, i seem to have more respect for my undergraduate institution where "higher learning" is preserved meaning they will kick out any student who does not maintain a certain academic grades which collerates to success.....Since medical schools seem to have these retention program aimed at pretty much graduating any dumb students that might have lurked into their program, CREATES PROBLEMS in our healthcare community vis-a-vis society. Yes, some college students have such similar retention programs but here we are talking about healthcare and not some undergraduate theater major.
I THINK these are the students that cost malpractice insurance rates to go up, bring embrassment to the medical community(e.g. duke) and others. Why should a "dumb" doctor serve society?
Have medical schools ever being protested for having such retention programs?
I am not yet in medical school but how do you percieve of your class that has such students? Does it bring shame to the class or is pretty much ignored by and the administration.
Don't get wrong, i am not insulting anyone... I just don't think patient should be left in the hands of any "dumb" doctor. Saving lifes comes before saving school's reputation. Right?
Let's say for every medical school class, at least 2% of the class are failures(academics) and that will certain add up at the end.. Hence, we might have a "flood of dumb doctors" and more appreciations for voodoo medicines.
This thread brings up an excellent point. Let me preface this by stating that I?m not trying to inflame the medical students in this forum. I?m just pointing out an important phenomenon in education in the U.S. that seems to go unacknowledged.
All postsecondary schools in the United States are tuition-based although many ?public? schools do receive state funding in addition to tuition. This is a very different system than in Canada, most European countries, and many other countries where postsecondary education is socialized. This privatization means that if a person can come up with tuition money, they are pretty much guaranteed admission into some college somewhere. Privatization also means that schools must compete for student tuition dollars since they do not receive government funding.
Fortunately, there are some poor but intelligent students who can go to school through financial aid because they are intelligent, but there are also some wealthy but not-so-intelligent students who can go to school because they can pay. So you really have the gamut of intelligence in our colleges and, therefore, not a uniform ?caliber? of student.
Also, since colleges have to compete for tuition dollars, they all want to be seen as ?prestigious? in order to boost their marketability. One way that they do this is by playing the ?numbers game? with grades and other statistics. If your grades are good enough in high school to get into an Ivy League college, your grades will remain good throughout college because it reflects poorly on the institution to have D students on board. Medical schools, like all graduate schools, do this too. If your undergraduate grades are good enough to get into graduate school, they will stay artificially high during graduate school.
Even some undergraduate ?public? schools are doing this now. The large public university where I did my undergraduate work has been notorious for many years for having a 5 year and 1 semester average undergraduate tenure in its liberal arts college. It is also a ?working person?s? university and has a lot of nontraditional students in the mix. So, to make itself look better and more marketable to prospective students, it is playing the numbers game and putting all the nontraditional students in a separate ?college? from the liberal arts college. Even though the students are all taking the same classes and getting the same degrees, culling all the nontraditionals from the pool has lowered the average undergraduate tenure to the standard 4 years. Once again, it?s just a numbers game.
So, it is true that some grade inflation and lower student ?caliber? is inevitable in countries with non-socialized education. The students that end up with the highest terminal degrees are not necessarily the best and brightest in the entire country and absolutely brilliant at everything, as other countries can claim. However, and there are certainly exceptions, I think that for the most part the majority of people who make it through medical school are intelligent enough to meet the requirements of being a doctor.
In addition, most doctors in the United States are primarily clinicians and their medical competence is based on their clinical skills much more than on their basic science skills. Private practice doctors have basic science professionals taking care of their histology, pathology, cytology, microbiology, biochemistry, and virology work, and so these doctors do not have to be experts in those areas. Academic doctors have Ph.D.s in their labs that can do the basic science component of their research for them. As long as doctors know their biology at the ?organism? level, they do not need to be absolute experts at biology at the cellular and molecular levels.
Just as medicine is very specialized in terms of basic science vs. clinical science, it is also becoming more and more specialized within the clinical sciences. This, of course, as with anything else, has its advantages and disadvantages. If we don?t specialize, we don?t advance our knowledge and abilities in the individual systems of the human body, but if we do specialize we sometimes risk harm to the overall patient (for example, when two different specialists prescribe drugs for a patient that should not be combined). Malpractice will result from this. Our society, right or wrong, seems to considers this acceptable collateral damage for advances in knowledge. I agree that doctors need to have a good foundation in all the basic sciences and basic clinical competence in all the specialty areas, but they cannot be experts in everything.
Another difference between the U.S. and other countries is that we deify doctors way too much in our culture. They are human beings with all the associated limitations. We cannot expect them to be omnipotent and omniscient gods. This expectation seems to have one of two negative impacts on doctor psychology. Sometimes the doctor develops a ?god complex? and does not ask for help when it is needed, and sometimes the doctor develops an ?imposter complex? and does not ask for help when it is needed. Malpractice will result from this. This is where we have to put our foot down and say the damage done is NOT acceptable. The suicide rate among doctors is also remarkably high compared to other profession groups, and I believe that this psychological isolation is a contributing factor. There are some doctors that have a healthy acceptance of their abilities and limitations, and this is what we need to cultivate in all doctors. We need to stop deifying doctors and reinforce that it is okay to be human and not perfect at everything and to ask for help when it is needed.
) as they can kill a person(whether direct or indirect) and get away with higher insurance payments. Those stupid medical schools offering summer classes for failures after money and nothing else. 
