I've been making this argument for some time. With modern technology, we should just find the absolute best professors in each category, record their lectures, and send those along with standardized tests to medical students throughout the country. Every doctor would get the best education instead of just whatever lecture a professor cobbled together between their research projects.
The only argument against this is that we'd be lacking in diversity of education, which could potentially put the entire medical field at risk for developing tunnel vision with regards to particular issues (i.e. everyone was taught one particular set of ideas, and now no one questions the ones that aren't actually sound).
However, I don't think capitalism would even allow the scenario described above. I wouldn't be at all against medical schools making contracts with commercial companies to design a largely "cut-and-paste" basic science curriculum based on a large bank of lectures/study materials, all designed by physicians of course. As of now, Kaplan already basically makes a complete medical school curriculum worth of material, and you can access pretty much all of it for a few hundred $. Boards and Beyond consistently outperforms my school's lectures and it's literally just one guy and a microphone, and it costs $200. You'd have tons of competitors in the field, and there would still be diversity in what was taught.
This approach also leaves the
rest of the curriculum, the clinical parts of 1st and 2nd year and all of 3rd/4th year, up to the schools. My school's attitude, and I think most schools are like this, is basically that they care way more about the clinical side of your education than the 2 years of what amounts to step 1 prep that comprises the majority of what they actually have to put together. My administration would find a way to mess this up. Probably they'd add even more midlevel training programs as tuition mills and further cut down on the number of physicians able (and willing) to take time out to teach medical students, or they'd forget there was a basic science curriculum and insist we spend 20 hours/week pretending to council each other about alcohol abuse while taking art classes to develop our sense of human expression. Still though, I believe there are schools that could understand that they absolutely suck at educating, and those schools could develop an awesome, integrated curriculum around this idea.
