I honestly can't believe there are medical students who think that doing the work of transporters and clerks is a vital part of their education. You guys are paying a FORTUNE to learn how to be a doctor by, basically, pretending to be one under a real physician's close supervision. If you're doing something else, a job that a working physician does not do, then your school is failing you. When you're doing a job that even an RN won't do, like faxing papers or walking beds to CT, then your school if failing you profoundly.
Think about what medical school was designed to be. When Osler and his compatriots made this whole thing up in the late 1800s medical school was designed to work exactly like residency does work now. The students did physician work like rounding, procedures, managing deliveries, and everything else a physician could do, all under the watchful eye of senior physicians. They didn't mime it, they didn't watch it, they did the work. The wrote the orders, they did the surgeries, and when they screwed up they did the autopsies. That's how you actually learn medicine in medical school.
After WWII, of course, residencies became a more and more of a requirement to work and medical school degenerated a bit. Now there was a second, higher priority class of trainees in the hospital and the medical students, despite paying slightly more to study medicine, were now supervised primarily not by senior physician educators but instead by brand new physicians who were themselves struggling to learn. Procedures began to go almost exclusively to residents and rounding became the only real place where students still acted like doctors. Still, the expectation was very much that students would at least pretend to be doctors. and as little as 10 years ago no one would describe MS3 as a waste of time.
Then in our generation things really began to collapse. Despite seeing tuition rise to the stratosphere, medical schools rapidly realized that there was a legal risk associated with allowing students to actually do anything. Furthermore, since the students were required to go through medical school to be allowed into a residency, there was no incentive whatsoever to provide any kind of education at all. In fact, they realized that they could save an extra few thousand by understaffing the wards of academic hospitals when it came to basic support staff, like clerks and transporters, because they know trainees will be forced to figure it out. Its like you went into a Michelin three star restaurant, paid $500 for your dinner, and the chef then came out and told you that not only will he not be cooking for you, but he expects you to help wash the dishes. If you protested I bet he'd even call you 'entitled'.
Medical school is turning into a scam. They are taking a fortune from you, for two years, to provide lectures of such low quality that everyone skips them and instead learns from the high quality lectures available online. They charge another fortune in MS3 to have you shadow disgruntled trainees who are not paid even a penny of that tuition and, again, to study materials that you buy yourself, online. In MS4 they charge you a fortune in exchange for nothing at all. Medical schools are changing from valuable educators into a form of regulatory capture: an industry that exists entirely because the law insists that it has to. It is the height of Stockholm syndrome to let someone tell you that this is exactly how medical education is supposed to work.
