Policy Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns

[Crayola227]

I don't know why people seem to forget about poor neighborhoods with crappily funded and ran public education... if as you say, education is the real means for upward mobility in this country, then it seems to me that if we want to claim that is a universal opportunity, then those schools need to have the resources to help students succeed at that level. And they don't. And even if they do, then what happens socioeconomically around the schools, at home, is a big issue.

However, I've seen first hand how parents ruin their children in a cycle of poverty, and I personally know how difficult it is to break through. I didn't technically finish high school because family drama left me living on the street, literally sleeping under a bridge. Being 16/17, technically a minor, with no mailing address, no phone number, no home, nowhere to bathe, nowhere to keep clothing for interviews/work, makes getting a job extremely difficult, let alone keeping one, and then getting the resources to have a place to live like first months/last months.

Even going back home to a rural town, going to community college was a struggle. Just getting there. Only 2 buses a day, 6 am and 6 pm. Makes school and part time job pretty tough. Eventually I got a car. I got gastritis because all I was doing was smoking a half pack a day of cigarettes and a $1.60 a day Mountain Dew, and one paltry dinner from food stamps/church food box in the evening. Keeping in mind that the half pack of cigarettes daily was cheaper than the amount of food I would have eaten otherwise (I learned this when I got more loans and more food... I was able to quit smoking. But it was at the cost of buying and eating more food). All so I could afford gas and insurance.

Ever slept under a bridge? Ever been in a situation of forced prostitution? Did you do all these things and get your coveted MD? If the answer is no, I don't really want to hear all y'alls little theories on how easy it is to come up in the US education-wise, or how the adversities I overcame were somehow my fault. Heck, most of it wasn't my parents' fault either.

I only made it where I am, because my parents valued education, they got stuck in the cycle of poverty but that wasn't where they came from. (I can write a separate rant about what it's like for kids whose families come from poverty, aren't educated, aren't in a place to foster that in their kids, help them with homework or extracurriculars, or even see to it that their kids are fed). The rural town where I lived had a poor part, and a rich part. The school district was good as a result of the nearby rich's tax dollars. I had gov't health insurance to treat my anemia from malnutrition, gov't peanut butter and beans in boxes, food stamps, and federal funds-supported financial aid, and need-based scholarships, and HUD housing. There was no coming up without these things.

As far as how it's so much better to be poor in the US, yes and no. For one, this isn't the Suffering Olympics. I don't care how "rich" anyone is compared to anyone, being so poor that you're basically hungry every minute of every day and trying to do Calculus and then manual labor to eat what little you do eat, is hard and it is depressing. There were times where I wanted to quit. And I don't mean quit so I could "retire" to the life of the working poor. It's fundamentally depressing. It's great that I didn't have to worry about waterborne illness on top of it all like you do in other countries, sure. But when I saw how the poor live in South America, you know what, it's not that different here in a lot of ways. Mostly, our infrastructure is better (housing codes, etc). We don't have dirt floors and Chagas isn't a concern. But hunger is, all the same.

Before we say how weak it is to feel poverty in the US drag you down like that, I recommend Tracy Kidder's book, Strength in What Remains. True story of Deo, a refugee from Burundi who was escaping the genocide there. Guess what, they were pretty freaking poor there, living in dirt floor huts and struggling for food and water. And he saw his own relatives and neighbors hacked into body parts by machetes, laying in the gutter. He came to the US, and he was dirt poor here. And I'll never forget how he says that being poor in America was actually worse than being poor in Africa. Specifically because you're surrounded by wealth, we're not "all in this together," and people treat you like it's your personal moral failing that you're poor. And what he learned about racial inequality. Now this guy eventually became a physician. He was taken in by a well-to-do family. I don't really see that happening for the majority of our poor or minorities.

I'm tired of hearing from people who never suffered poverty on this scale, telling any of the rest of us who have actually experienced the cycle of poverty, hunger, or racial inequality, either how these things don't exist, or how it's possible to rise above by pulling on your own bootstraps and without a helping hand - and if you think that you can remove gov't hands and that community ones will just reach out, you're seriously deluded about the generosity of your fellow man. I'd like to see you take in a refugee or some foster kids first.

And the tales of immigrants who come here and their kids do well - in those tales is always extreme poverty and supportive parents. We all tell ourselves that the extreme poverty they experience is OK, because, well, they got to come here and it's better than where they came from. Like somehow that isn't still a tale of racial inequality, or that it makes hunger in this country less than ridiculous for immigrant or non-immigrant alike. Nevermind as well that immigrant parents have a self-selection for certain attributes that you might not find in our native poor. These stories often have the benefit of a certain wealth - supportive parents. And guess what, that isn't a virtue a child gets to choose, and it's one that's lacking for many here.

Then trotting out people who suffer in these ways, don't complain, well, great, I guess. I know people who have been sexually abused by family members that don't complain or find much fault in the transgressors. I guess that's a virtue to not complain, depending on who you are and your perspective. You'll have to forgive the rest of us that take issue.

I could write a few more pages on the topic of the poor or immigrants who come up and then wonder what everyone else has to complain about.

Plus, it's great if you think education means you should have more. But I know plenty of hard-working people who don't seem cut out for college. I don't think anyone working full time should be worried how they're going to eat.

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[deleted480308]

I don't know why people seem to forget about poor neighborhoods with crappily funded and ran public education... if as you say, education is the real means for upward mobility in this country, then it seems to me that if we want to claim that is a universal opportunity, then those schools need to have the resources to help students succeed at that level. And they don't. And even if they do, then what happens socioeconomically around the schools, at home, is a big issue.

However, I've seen first hand how parents ruin their children in a cycle of poverty, and I personally know how difficult it is to break through. I didn't technically finish high school because family drama left me living on the street, literally sleeping under a bridge. Being 16/17, technically a minor, with no mailing address, no phone number, no home, nowhere to bathe, nowhere to keep clothing for interviews/work, makes getting a job extremely difficult, let alone keeping one, and then getting the resources to have a place to live like first months/last months.

Even going back home to a rural town, going to community college was a struggle. Just getting there. Only 2 buses a day, 6 am and 6 pm. Makes school and part time job pretty tough. Eventually I got a car. I got gastritis because all I was doing was smoking a half pack a day of cigarettes and a $1.60 a day Mountain Dew, and one paltry dinner from food stamps/church food box in the evening. Keeping in mind that the half pack of cigarettes daily was cheaper than the amount of food I would have eaten otherwise (I learned this when I got more loans and more food... I was able to quit smoking. But it was at the cost of buying and eating more food). All so I could afford gas and insurance.

Ever slept under a bridge? Ever been in a situation of forced prostitution? Did you do all these things and get your coveted MD? If the answer is no, I don't really want to hear all y'alls little theories on how easy it is to come up in the US education-wise, or how the adversities I overcame were somehow my fault. Heck, most of it wasn't my parents' fault either.

I only made it where I am, because my parents valued education, they got stuck in the cycle of poverty but that wasn't where they came from. (I can write a separate rant about what it's like for kids whose families come from poverty, aren't educated, aren't in a place to foster that in their kids, help them with homework or extracurriculars, or even see to it that their kids are fed). The rural town where I lived had a poor part, and a rich part. The school district was good as a result of the nearby rich's tax dollars. I had gov't health insurance to treat my anemia from malnutrition, gov't peanut butter and beans in boxes, food stamps, and federal funds-supported financial aid, and need-based scholarships, and HUD housing. There was no coming up without these things.

As far as how it's so much better to be poor in the US, yes and no. For one, this isn't the Suffering Olympics. I don't care how "rich" anyone is compared to anyone, being so poor that you're basically hungry every minute of every day and trying to do Calculus and then manual labor to eat what little you do eat, is hard and it is depressing. There were times where I wanted to quit. And I don't mean quit so I could "retire" to the life of the working poor. It's fundamentally depressing. It's great that I didn't have to worry about waterborne illness on top of it all like you do in other countries, sure. But when I saw how the poor live in South America, you know what, it's not that different here in a lot of ways. Mostly, our infrastructure is better (housing codes, etc). We don't have dirt floors and Chagas isn't a concern. But hunger is, all the same.

Before we say how weak it is to feel poverty in the US drag you down like that, I recommend Tracy Kidder's book, Strength in What Remains. True story of Deo, a refugee from Burundi who was escaping the genocide there. Guess what, they were pretty freaking poor there, living in dirt floor huts and struggling for food and water. And he saw his own relatives and neighbors hacked into body parts by machetes, laying in the gutter. He came to the US, and he was dirt poor here. And I'll never forget how he says that being poor in America was actually worse than being poor in Africa. Specifically because you're surrounded by wealth, we're not "all in this together," and people treat you like it's your personal moral failing that you're poor. And what he learned about racial inequality. Now this guy eventually became a physician. He was taken in by a well-to-do family. I don't really see that happening for the majority of our poor or minorities.

I'm tired of hearing from people who never suffered poverty on this scale, telling any of the rest of us who have actually experienced the cycle of poverty, hunger, or racial inequality, either how these things don't exist, or how it's possible to rise above by pulling on your own bootstraps and without a helping hand - and if you think that you can remove gov't hands and that community ones will just reach out, you're seriously deluded about the generosity of your fellow man. I'd like to see you take in a refugee or some foster kids first.

And the tales of immigrants who come here and their kids do well - in those tales is always extreme poverty and supportive parents. We all tell ourselves that the extreme poverty they experience is OK, because, well, they got to come here and it's better than where they came from. Like somehow that isn't still a tale of racial inequality, or that it makes hunger in this country less than ridiculous for immigrant or non-immigrant alike. Nevermind as well that immigrant parents have a self-selection for certain attributes that you might not find in our native poor. These stories often have the benefit of a certain wealth - supportive parents. And guess what, that isn't a virtue a child gets to choose, and it's one that's lacking for many here.

Then trotting out people who suffer in these ways, don't complain, well, great, I guess. I know people who have been sexually abused by family members that don't complain or find much fault in the transgressors. I guess that's a virtue to not complain, depending on who you are and your perspective. You'll have to forgive the rest of us that take issue.

I could write a few more pages on the topic of the poor or immigrants who come up and then wonder what everyone else has to complain about.

Plus, it's great if you think education means you should have more. But I know plenty of hard-working people who don't seem cut out for college. I don't think anyone working full time should be worried how they're going to eat.

Economics is just trading value. Showing up somewhere 40hrs a week doesn’t mean you deserve any more than how much someone else values what you do. Plenty of physical work pays $100k/yr. some work isn’t

If the work someone offers can’t find a buyer willing to pay more than food, they need a new skill or a new location

I don’t think the argument is even about how hard it is to bootstrap your way up, the argument is does hardship create a right to demand from others?

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

Economics is just trading value. Showing up somewhere 40hrs a week doesn’t mean you deserve any more than how much someone else values what you do. Plenty of physical work pays $100k/yr. some work isn’t

If the work someone offers can’t find a buyer willing to pay more than food, they need a new skill or a new location

I don’t think the argument is even about how hard it is to bootstrap your way up, the argument is does hardship create a right to demand from others?

There's an apartment complex 1/2 mile from my house advertising $18/hour for just a general maintenance guy. Not even a plumber or HVAC certified repair tech, just general maintenance. If my apartment memories are any guide, this guy will plunge toilets, change smoke detector batteries, and maybe flip switches in the fuse box at most.

 

[wamcp]

I don't know why people seem to forget about poor neighborhoods with crappily funded and ran public education... if as you say, education is the real means for upward mobility in this country, then it seems to me that if we want to claim that is a universal opportunity, then those schools need to have the resources to help students succeed at that level. And they don't. And even if they do, then what happens socioeconomically around the schools, at home, is a big issue.

However, I've seen first hand how parents ruin their children in a cycle of poverty, and I personally know how difficult it is to break through. I didn't technically finish high school because family drama left me living on the street, literally sleeping under a bridge. Being 16/17, technically a minor, with no mailing address, no phone number, no home, nowhere to bathe, nowhere to keep clothing for interviews/work, makes getting a job extremely difficult, let alone keeping one, and then getting the resources to have a place to live like first months/last months.

Even going back home to a rural town, going to community college was a struggle. Just getting there. Only 2 buses a day, 6 am and 6 pm. Makes school and part time job pretty tough. Eventually I got a car. I got gastritis because all I was doing was smoking a half pack a day of cigarettes and a $1.60 a day Mountain Dew, and one paltry dinner from food stamps/church food box in the evening. Keeping in mind that the half pack of cigarettes daily was cheaper than the amount of food I would have eaten otherwise (I learned this when I got more loans and more food... I was able to quit smoking. But it was at the cost of buying and eating more food). All so I could afford gas and insurance.

Ever slept under a bridge? Ever been in a situation of forced prostitution? Did you do all these things and get your coveted MD? If the answer is no, I don't really want to hear all y'alls little theories on how easy it is to come up in the US education-wise, or how the adversities I overcame were somehow my fault. Heck, most of it wasn't my parents' fault either.

I only made it where I am, because my parents valued education, they got stuck in the cycle of poverty but that wasn't where they came from. (I can write a separate rant about what it's like for kids whose families come from poverty, aren't educated, aren't in a place to foster that in their kids, help them with homework or extracurriculars, or even see to it that their kids are fed). The rural town where I lived had a poor part, and a rich part. The school district was good as a result of the nearby rich's tax dollars. I had gov't health insurance to treat my anemia from malnutrition, gov't peanut butter and beans in boxes, food stamps, and federal funds-supported financial aid, and need-based scholarships, and HUD housing. There was no coming up without these things.

As far as how it's so much better to be poor in the US, yes and no. For one, this isn't the Suffering Olympics. I don't care how "rich" anyone is compared to anyone, being so poor that you're basically hungry every minute of every day and trying to do Calculus and then manual labor to eat what little you do eat, is hard and it is depressing. There were times where I wanted to quit. And I don't mean quit so I could "retire" to the life of the working poor. It's fundamentally depressing. It's great that I didn't have to worry about waterborne illness on top of it all like you do in other countries, sure. But when I saw how the poor live in South America, you know what, it's not that different here in a lot of ways. Mostly, our infrastructure is better (housing codes, etc). We don't have dirt floors and Chagas isn't a concern. But hunger is, all the same.

Before we say how weak it is to feel poverty in the US drag you down like that, I recommend Tracy Kidder's book, Strength in What Remains. True story of Deo, a refugee from Burundi who was escaping the genocide there. Guess what, they were pretty freaking poor there, living in dirt floor huts and struggling for food and water. And he saw his own relatives and neighbors hacked into body parts by machetes, laying in the gutter. He came to the US, and he was dirt poor here. And I'll never forget how he says that being poor in America was actually worse than being poor in Africa. Specifically because you're surrounded by wealth, we're not "all in this together," and people treat you like it's your personal moral failing that you're poor. And what he learned about racial inequality. Now this guy eventually became a physician. He was taken in by a well-to-do family. I don't really see that happening for the majority of our poor or minorities.

I'm tired of hearing from people who never suffered poverty on this scale, telling any of the rest of us who have actually experienced the cycle of poverty, hunger, or racial inequality, either how these things don't exist, or how it's possible to rise above by pulling on your own bootstraps and without a helping hand - and if you think that you can remove gov't hands and that community ones will just reach out, you're seriously deluded about the generosity of your fellow man. I'd like to see you take in a refugee or some foster kids first.

And the tales of immigrants who come here and their kids do well - in those tales is always extreme poverty and supportive parents. We all tell ourselves that the extreme poverty they experience is OK, because, well, they got to come here and it's better than where they came from. Like somehow that isn't still a tale of racial inequality, or that it makes hunger in this country less than ridiculous for immigrant or non-immigrant alike. Nevermind as well that immigrant parents have a self-selection for certain attributes that you might not find in our native poor. These stories often have the benefit of a certain wealth - supportive parents. And guess what, that isn't a virtue a child gets to choose, and it's one that's lacking for many here.

Then trotting out people who suffer in these ways, don't complain, well, great, I guess. I know people who have been sexually abused by family members that don't complain or find much fault in the transgressors. I guess that's a virtue to not complain, depending on who you are and your perspective. You'll have to forgive the rest of us that take issue.

I could write a few more pages on the topic of the poor or immigrants who come up and then wonder what everyone else has to complain about.

Plus, it's great if you think education means you should have more. But I know plenty of hard-working people who don't seem cut out for college. I don't think anyone working full time should be worried how they're going to eat.

What I gleaned from your lengthy stream of consciousness post was my point exactly. The WAY you are brought up by your family is critical to later success in life. Growing up with poor income is secondary to this. Education is the best way out of poverty. Importance of education depends on the values and culture of the parents/family. It does not depend on government handouts.

This is what I conveyed in my reply you responded to. Welfare programs DO NOT FIX OR CHANGE FAMILY VALUES.

 

[Crayola227]

What I gleaned from your lengthy stream of consciousness post was my point exactly. The WAY you are brought up by your family is critical to later success in life. Growing up with poor income is secondary to this. Education is the best way out of poverty. Importance of education depends on the values and culture of the parents/family. It does not depend on government handouts.

This is what I conveyed in my reply you responded to. Welfare programs DO NOT FIX OR CHANGE FAMILY VALUES.

I would argue that government handouts might still be needed for those who value education to have the opportunities to follow through on that, as said in my stream of consciousness.

Also, and it came to my mind re: the mention of a "gangsta" culture that values just getting high or whatever, that money affects values. There are studies that support this. Many from the inner city talk about how poverty affects what is valued and what people believe they can attain.

There is data that suggests that behavior and school performance is better in children who are provided school meals. There are other gov't funded programs for kids that have been shown to make a similar difference - after school care, extracurriculars, sports. The number of sick days matters, and there are studies supporting the need for medical and dental care for kids - both through insurance, and also ensuring actual access.

This kind of logic flows upward. Many parents want their kids to do well in school, but don't have the resources. Parents actually parent better when they themselves are not hungry, not working 2 jobs and never home to care for the kids, etc.

I would argue that government programs can help families live according to their values, or even develop new ones.

 

[stickflip723]

I would argue that government handouts might still be needed for those who value education to have the opportunities to follow through on that, as said in my stream of consciousness.

Also, and it came to my mind re: the mention of a "gangsta" culture that values just getting high or whatever, that money affects values. There are studies that support this. Many from the inner city talk about how poverty affects what is valued and what people believe they can attain.

There is data that suggests that behavior and school performance is better in children who are provided school meals. There are other gov't funded programs for kids that have been shown to make a similar difference - after school care, extracurriculars, sports. The number of sick days matters, and there are studies supporting the need for medical and dental care for kids - both through insurance, and also ensuring actual access.

This kind of logic flows upward. Many parents want their kids to do well in school, but don't have the resources. Parents actually parent better when they themselves are not hungry, not working 2 jobs and never home to care for the kids, etc.

I would argue that government programs can help families live according to their values, or even develop new ones.

I'm not so convinced that it's the money that is holding people back from living out their own values. Take the case of asian immigrants in NYC elite high schools. Children of asian immigrants have a huge and disproportionate representation in these schools, something that DeBlasio attributes to families paying for expensive resources and buying their way in, yet the vast majority of these children come from working class households living in poverty. They just work their asses off, and good on them. They deserve every success that comes to them. The same thing happened with City College in New York back in the day. Jews were excluded from the Ivys, so they went to CCNY and made it the "Harvard on the Hudson" with the most Nobel laureates of any public university. Many of them came from LES families who were working class recent immigrants. What is unique about the situation today?

That said, I think all the things you listed - extracurriculars, sports, insurance, etc - are all wonderful things and opportunities that I would hope for any child. I'm just not so sure that their absence is contributing to the problem here.

 

[wamcp]

I would argue that government handouts might still be needed for those who value education to have the opportunities to follow through on that, as said in my stream of consciousness.

Also, and it came to my mind re: the mention of a "gangsta" culture that values just getting high or whatever, that money affects values. There are studies that support this. Many from the inner city talk about how poverty affects what is valued and what people believe they can attain.

There is data that suggests that behavior and school performance is better in children who are provided school meals. There are other gov't funded programs for kids that have been shown to make a similar difference - after school care, extracurriculars, sports. The number of sick days matters, and there are studies supporting the need for medical and dental care for kids - both through insurance, and also ensuring actual access.

This kind of logic flows upward. Many parents want their kids to do well in school, but don't have the resources. Parents actually parent better when they themselves are not hungry, not working 2 jobs and never home to care for the kids, etc.

I would argue that government programs can help families live according to their values, or even develop new ones.

You're simply reinforcing my point
Giving material resources and support to families that have parents who value education and work ethic for their children will no doubt help them succeed, yes, I agree 100%.
Giving material resources and support to every family that have parents who DON'T care about their children's education...is not going to change anything, it will not make them suddenly have an epiphany and change what they do with the resources.

 

[Crayola227]

You're simply reinforcing my point
Giving material resources and support to families that have parents who value education and work ethic for their children will no doubt help them succeed, yes, I agree 100%.
Giving material resources and support to every family that have parents who DON'T care about their children's education...is not going to change anything, it will not make them suddenly have an epiphany and change what they do with the resources.

There is an argument that if we want kids to come out differently than their parents, which in a lot of ways is to say we want them to have different coping mechanisms, values, sense of agency, internal locus of control, steer away from learned helplessness.... then we may have to "give" some things to these "undeserving" families and really to the children, although by proxy, to the parents.

I did a project in med school where I came across data that parents were more likely to take their children to the dentist, when they themselves had dental insurance, not just the children. Of course there was some speculation as to why. One would hope that one would use dental coverage for their children despite not having any themselves. Regardless, in my mind if the "price" of healthier teeth, health, fewer days from work/school productivity, is to "give" dental insurance to the poor including parents, I think that practice might be substantiated.

If we want families/children to value health care, preventative health, and caring for their own health, than to me it seems reasonable to do more to make that available. I've seen a change in insurance status lead to a completely different attitude about seeing a doctor and talking doctor's advice. Again, parental attitudes make a difference. If we want families as a whole to value these things, it might mean giving it to the whole family.

If we want kids to use athletic activities as a coping mechanism over smoking cigarettes for example.

This is all stuff that I dealt with up close not just in my family first hand, but first hand in my community.

People don't want to believe that helping others can actually change them for the better, because it shifts the responsibility from the "bad" people to just help themselves, to others to need to help those people to see change. This might seem counter to what I'm saying about teaching people about internal locus of control and self agency, but we know that learned helplessness is just that - learned.

People will never have an internal locus of control or a sense of agency if what they do doesn't have meaningful impact on their sense of security for basics like housing, health, food.

Thing is, these "experiments" regarding access to food, housing, health care - they've already been done in other countries. The real issue then, is to consider to what degree you can generalize results cross cultures, and to consider costs in implementation and in returns on investment.

 

[deleted171991]

Complete and utter bull****.

First of all, curriculum changes are not coming at the expense of a rigorous scientific and clinical education. Getting a residency spot is more competitive than ever. Scores for the most objective measure of pure "knowledge" that we have, USMLE Step 1, are at their highest point ever and continue to rise. To say that producing more "woke" doctors means producing worse doctors is completely disingenuous and reeks of an old guard, "they don't make 'em like they used to" type of mindset.

This guy is arguing that we should ignore social inequities which are a huge driver of our country having worse overall health outcomes than most developed nations? That we should be satisfied with patching people up and sending them back out into a world which is set up for them to fail and end up back in the hospital? If our job as doctors is to care for the sick and improve the health of our patients, then there is little we could do that would be more effective at improving public health than addressing social inequities, and that requires being aware of social determinants of health.

This author is part of an old guard that believes that treating the sick is more important than preventing poor health in the first place. It's no wonder that we have the most expensive healthcare in the world and some of the worst outcomes amongst developed countries.

Edit: had to add more because I read the comment by the editorial board again and became even more infuriated. Who the **** is the Wall Street Journal's editorial board to comment on the quality of medical student that comes out of UPenn? They have no credibility in that realm whatsoever. "The politicization of medical education that should worry all Americans" -- are you kidding me? This is such an irresponsible take. I don't understand how they can call themselves respectable journalists with this piece of irresponsible fear-mongering.

QED. A snotty nobody medical student judges the thoughts of a much older and more experienced professional, who also happens to be a university professor and former associate dean, and probably way more knowledgeable in medical curricula (and many other things). But, hey, we live in the era when the plebs are expert at everything, when the greenhorn trainee considers it normal to call his teacher by his/her first name (despite the difference in decades of age, experience and rank), and when it's not progressively correct to call a spade a spade because it could hurt the snowflakes' feelings.

As Dr. Goldfarb said:
"A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize "social justice" that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular."

But, hey, I am just another older ***** who studied undergraduate medicine for 5-6 years, and still thought the time was too short, despite 95% of it having been scientific medicine, and not bullsh-t studies.

Also, this must be a result of affirmative action and other programs that dilute the meritocracy. Only one who's not paying hundreds of thousands for one's medical education could care so little about being taught stuff with almost zero importance for practicing medicine in the real world (but which makes the students feel good and righteous, like a sirupy happy-end Hollywood movie).

Guess what? My generation can provide first-class care for LGBTQ and other groups, despite them not having even been mentioned in our medical school curriculum. Because, in the end, each person is a human being, and compassion and empathy can't be taught. And my generation has the world-class training in the fundamentals of medicine that allows us to always grab a book and read up on a subject, if needed, something fewer and fewer snowflakes seem to be able to do (because of wasting precious time on non-medical subjects, instead of anatomy, physiology, clinical exam etc.).

What's happening in American higher education reminds me of "The Emperor's Club": Don't Mold My Son - Movie Clip from The Emperor's Club

What the snowflakes seem not to realize is that this may be a big conspiracy to dilute medical studies towards the level of advanced nursing ones, so that the two categories of graduates become comparable (when they are simply not even close in any other country, because those do have hierarchies in medicine). Has anybody looked at how many non-physicians have been on the board of directors of the AAMC in recent years? The current chair is a finance person. There are also 5 other non-physicians, which makes them more than 1/3 of the board. None of the AAMC board members comes from private practice, AKA the real world.

 

[Select All That Apply]

@FFP I wish you didn't like my post, because it actually caused me to parse through this thread and read more comments from Dro, Crayola, and YouMDbro. Notice how these users use charged rhetoric and make claims like people are forgetting about poor neighborhoods when there was no reason to warrant a conversation about the pre-K & K-12 education system in these areas when the topic is about medical school education. In a logical conversation, it would be obviously conflation to be having a conversation stem on professional school education and then having someone pop out of nowhere and tell the audience that they forgot about the underprivileged living in the projects and having to live off of food stamps. Ridiculous.

@wamcp Noticing that the post was completely stream of consciousness is incredibly accurate as Crayola was responding to absolutely no one in the first place. No one who had a semblance to the "pro" side of the OP had made this comment in any form. Honestly, go back and Ctrl+F on Pages 1+2 and tell me who had made a statement resembling what I have quoted:

... if as you say, education is the real means for upward mobility in this country...

Who typed this? Who are you responding to? The only people who have any semblance of making such a statement are people like Dro and YouMDbro who combined have brought it up for approximately 90% of the total thread conversation. I suppose the advantage with not actually quoting people who you are supposedly responding to is that you can create any figurative straw man. I'm assuming that a straw man is a needed vehicle in order to have an excuse to launch into a livejournal post about living with gastritis from smoking cigarettes and drinking Mountain Dew while living under a bridge. What's upsetting to me isn't the stream of consciousness, but the absolutely shallow attempt to introduce a topic about the lack of privilege in poor "crappily" funded neighborhoods so that they could transition into their own sob story so they could use it as leverage to basically say, "If you haven't been homeless before then you are privileged and I am right in everything I type." Ridiculous. You aren't the only person who has dealt with homelessness, using it as a life experience card to not participate in a logical conversation while using the inner city and "gangsta" lifestyle as being cogent with your life under a bridge is absurd. And I did have the misfortune of going through an analogous experience, but I couldn't care less if you aren't going to read my post because it seems like you don't really read through them in the first place.

Does anyone else notice the comment from YouMDBro how his opening parse is a reference to pre-1950s Jim Crow America? And then he calls the OP a dinosaur! Is this really the opening for a conversational dialogue to entertain any ideas that might change their future thought process. I wrote this on my very first post that the con side for this will react in disgust. The only reason I know that systematically there is going to be an outrage response from people proximal to my age cohort is because the current postsecondary education system, super-specialized private chat groups, and marketing is created to endorse people who are ideologically divided and insulated from having to have an actual conversation with people who don't mimic their exact values. And because of this, when they are exposed to dialogue outside of their comfort zone they react with disgust, plug in their usual beliefs, and then go back to their chat groups and marketed advertisements where they do not have to exposed to the toxicity of SDN. But the people who will always lose in these conversations are the naive people who actually think that our generation will listen to logical and constructive commentary. Honestly, it's a complete waste which is such an irony considering the central crux of this conversation is about postsecondary professional education.