this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it's my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I'm not saying I know everything about how the world works, or that I know better than you when it comes to medicine, but I know enough to recognize my limits, which is something with which doctors (and engineers) struggle.
Granted, some of these conclusions are due to my anecdotal experience, but there are lots of studies looking at instruction in med school vs grad school that reach the conclusion that medicine is not science specifically because medical schools do not emphasize skepticism and critical thought to the same extent that science programs do. I'll find some studies and link them when I'm not on mobile.
edit: Here's an op-ed from a professor at the University of Washington Medical School. Study 1. Study 2.
I'm not claiming to know all of these things. I'm not pretending that I do, but there is still an expectation that I know what kinds of health problems my patients are at risk for based on their lifestyle. I'm better off in this area than a lot of my classmates because I didn't go straight from kindergarten through medical school. My undergraduate degree is in history and I worked in tech for a while before going back to school. My hobbies are all over the place, including having done blacksmithing with my Dad when I was a kid. I have significantly more life experience than most of my classmates, so I have a leg up on being familiar with these things.
I know that there is a lot that I don't know which is why my approach to medicine is that I will be studying and learning until the day I retire. I have a pretty good idea of where my limits are and when to call a specialist for things I'm not sure about. I make a point to learn as much as I can from everyone, patients, other physicians, my friends, random folks on the street/internet...everyone.
For example, I know from watching a dumb youtube channel about some of the weird chemicals that someone who worked as an armorer in the Army would have been exposed to that can have some serious health effects, but that wasn't something that was explicitly covered in my formal medical school education. I have friends in the Navy and they're the ones that told me about the weird fertility effects of working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The Naval medical academy did a study on it, but I would have never had the inclination to go read that study if I hadn't heard about it from my friends. The list goes on. There's so many things that are important for me to know that will never be covered in our lectures in school and wouldn't even come up as things to learn about if I didn't learn about them from other people.