I don't know too much about this case, but there is a fallacy in thinking that the school shoulders the blame. You do not learn surgical techniques in medical school, and it is not the responsibility of medical schools to teach procedural techniques. Schools teach basic suturing and theory, but not specific techniques themselves. These are taught during residency and fellowships, not medical school. So obviously this guy performed well enough in medical school to have some residency program accept him, and after residency, he impressed some hospital well enough to hire him.
The flaw of the article is that they imply schools are to fault when that is completely out of their jurisdiction. The article also says that the technique he performed was taught at a weekend seminar, which is completely unrelated to his medical school.
The article doesn't go into depth about exactly what mistake he made which caused the problems. After a cholecystectomy, it wouldn't be unreasonable to close off the end of the free-hanging bile duct - the article doesn't say exactly what it was that was unreasonable. And the fact that he had to staple could indicate that it was an open operation instead of a lap chole, which would automatically mean it was a complicated gallbladder and thus have more risks associated with it. The article also neglects to go into why the patient had an intestinal perforation, which would also point to either a signficant complication of his disease or another severe comorbidity.
Lastly, there are many good schools which do not require an undergrad degree. For instance, none of the Irish or UK schools do. There have been those who started an undergrad degree, figured out early on that they wanted to do medicine and decided not to finish their undergrad in order to pursue medicine earlier. Everywhere else besides the US and Canada accept students from high school.
So the bottom line is this: you must look carefully and really know how to analyze situations before jumping on a media bandwagon. What's obvious to me from that article is that those doctors themselves were bad, not their schools. You can get by medical school without being the brightest spark. Hell, you can get into medicine and not be the brightest spark too. Medicine isn't difficult to understand. But for those doctors to have gotten through, they obviously were not reprimanded severely enough or taught well enough during the course of their residency training.
