Your point is essentially that learning Spanish isn't that useful because so many people already speak it. I used the non-English-speaking physician to point out the fallacy in your argument. After all, why learn English when so many people already speak it?
If we're talking about American doctors, who, for the most part, had to pass American medical school classes or at the very least had to have a strong enough grasp of English to pass their licensing exam, then your argument isn't really valid in this country to begin with.
But I think there is a strong difference between speaking only English and speaking only Spanish. While there are certainly exceptions, like in some parts of Florida and Texas, there are few places in the US where a doctor who speaks only Spanish will not have a vast majority of patients that speak English. This doesn't mean that the patients don't also speak Spanish, but a great deal of Spanish speakers also speak English, as well as French speakers, German speakers, whatever. At the end of the day, English, not Spanish, will almost always be the primary language of the day.
And we're talking also about patient-provider communication and two years of a college language. Doctors also need to be able to communicate with their peers and read medical journals, all primarily written in English. While they could try to get by with a translator for day-to-day communication with their boss and coworkers, I think we can both agree that it is a FAR more inconvenient situation for a doctor that only speaks Spanish than a doctor that doesn't speak any Spanish. Someone with two years of Spanish could likely pick up all they would ever need to know to communicate in Spanish with a patient very shortly. The amount of English a Spanish-speaker would need to learn in order to communicate with a fellow doctor about medical related stuff is much, much greater.
These two situations do not relate to each other very well, given the sheer difference in the types of communication both parties are expected to handle.
Your point about French is also suspect. There is actually a decent number of French-speaking people in this country. But what about Swahili? What about Mongolian? What if a Mongolian patient comes in? Are you really gonna learn Mongolian for the off chance that a Mongolian patient may come in one day, or are you gonna learn a language for the plethora of English and Spanish speaking patients that make up 90+% of your patient pool?
No, I'm not saying that a person should learn any language simply because it will help them as a doctor. I think a person can be a great doctor without even being bilingual.
My point, though, is that taking any language is not going to be a DETRIMENT. Even if a person doesn't manage to pick up Spanish sometime after college (like during medical school electives), there is not likely to be a situation where this person will NEVER find the language they know to be useful (so long as we're leaving obscure languages like aboriginal clicks with astronomical chances of ending up in the US out). If they are the only person in an area that knows a certain language, and there is a situation that comes up where they or someone they know needs that language, then it will have proven to be worth it.
The situation where someone is in need of a Spanish speaker and is unable to find one is, in most areas, not an issue. The need for a French speaker, or a Russian speaker, or yes, a Mongolian speaker, though, does exist. It may not be a constant problem, and it may not get used more than once. But that one time it does get used, it could mean the difference between life and death (due to the lack of anyone else who speaks the language), whereas with Spanish, it's likely to mean the difference between immediate communication and a few minutes of waiting. And in most situations, that will not be a problem.
As I said, this is not to say that taking Spanish is bad, or taking any other language is going to be extremely useful. My only point is that in the grand scheme of things, chaos theory is going to take over, and you're going to have the skills you have. If you know Mongolian when that Mongolian patient is there, great. Your language was put to good use. For all you know, you may get flown across the country to deal with this Mongolian patient, since you're the only one who can speak Mongolian. If you've learned Spanish, great. But if you don't know it, send that person to the doctor next door who speaks it.
