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Patrick
2023 Jan 23, 4:28pm
Patrick
2023 Jan 23, 4:28pm
AmericanKulak says
I worked in a medical lab as an undergraduate at U. Michigan Ann Arbor. A doctor I worked with, Dr. Elizabeth Young (since then deceased, so I can give her name), used to complain to me that she was always getting letters from the AMA asking for donations. She told me that the whole function of the AMA was to limit the number of doctors to keep their salaries high, and that she would never donate.
America is crucially short of Doctors and Nurses.
The AMA and Hospital Industry likes it this way.
I worked in a medical lab as an undergraduate at U. Michigan Ann Arbor. A doctor I worked with, Dr. Elizabeth Young (since then deceased, so I can give her name), used to complain to me that she was always getting letters from the AMA asking for donations. She told me that the whole function of the AMA was to limit the number of doctors to keep their salaries high, and that she would never donate.
The AMA and Hospital Industry likes it this way.
The major problem is the hazing system of US Doctors: the brutal hours of studying theory leaving them as med school graduates with six figure debts and no practical skills. Med School grads cannot legally draw blood or run an IV without residency.
The Hospitals get the bottleneck of residency offers, so they get student doctors for $13/hr and work them 50-60 hours a week - all of whom begin with less practical medical experience than an LPN, much less an RN. That creates huge emergency room and hospital profits. Meanwhile patients get an overworked, befuddled, underpaid, and stressed out and sleep deprived inexperienced doctor at the most crucial point of service. It would be one thing if these doctors were doing residency in an out-patient clinic where people with massive strokes, heart attacks, etc. weren't showing up every few minutes.
Wouldn't you want a physician who started with Bunyons and Anal Cysts, rather than responsible for emergency congestive heart failure and poisoning treatments a few weeks after graduating a lecture/theory driven program? Somebody who until they arrived at the hospital, never gave an IV to an actual patient and who never wrote a prescription for so much as Amox or Lisonopril until they got hired by the hospital a few days ago?
The answer is to reform Pre-Med into just a Med program. 1 year = LPN license (to continue, you must pass the LPN licensing in your state) with a mandatory hands-on semester of paid LPN work to ensure experience. 4th year = RN License (again, passing licensing exams), again, with at least one semester of mandatory internship.
Then one year of theory to be a Physicians Assistant/Nurse Practicioner, which would be combined, followed by two semesters of hands on internship and then the passing of licensing exams. This would be just short of 6 years of education and internship, not just lecture and theory.
Anybody who decides they're ready to work and stop school for a while can resume anytime, meanwhile they can be added to the workforce in a capacity besides "MD - Research Only".
Finally, two more years of combined half time student, half time internship UNDER a doctor at an non-critical, non-emergency facility being paid AT LEAST a PA/NP's wages, and you could take the final medical exam to become a doctor.
This would be cheaper, more efficient, and better than the ridiculous system that exists today of endless study and expense, then ending up totally useless unless you become a Big Hospital Slave.
Every new doctor would have already spent a year and a half acting as a Nurse/PA before seeing a patient and being responsible for their entire care.