this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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it's not encouraging to think of someone being in med school and not reading the course description before signing up. if there was no course description that's almost even worse
As someone who teaches chemistry to premeds, this is not surprising at all. To make a sweeping generalization, premeds, med students, and the MDs they become are some of the most entitled, condescending, and oblivious people I've ever met.
There are exceptions of course, but in general, I can't stand most premeds and I really can't stand how our culture puts MDs on a pedestal.
yea, a friend of mine from high school went through all of it and became a general surgeon. and i've heard stories. that and my experience from dating and living with a CFer lung transplant patient probably gave me as much of an "outsider's view" of the medical/hospital industry as one could possibly have
the MD=pedestal thing died for me long ago
i know i'm not talking about the "point" of the post. don't care.
So I'm curious. The way I see it, the actual practicing of medicine doesn't advance the field itself. What advances it is research and development. Do the researchers actually go though med school or is that path more like biology PhD, chemistry PhD, etc?
There are medical researchers that have MD's, but they are not practicing physicians (usually). There are MD/PhD programs that are aimed toward medical research fields (usually with the PhD being in biology or chemistry as you mentioned), and lots of biological and biomedical engineers working on certain medical fields as well (especially using stem cells and other chemical cues to regrow tissues). So yeah, biology- and physiology-adjacent sciences are where most of the actual advances are happening.
Actually practicing medicine is basically like being a mechanic that specializes in keeping one particularly poorly designed piece of equipment running.
So was a wrong, most researchers go through MD/PhD programs? Like what percent of researchers go through medical school? 50/50?
I don't know that you're wrong, because those MD/PhD programs are exceptionally demanding (but are a good way to avoid med school debt for some). It's more that even for pure MD's, research is a very, very different career path than practicing physician. I think researchers still have to go through residency, but after that they're mostly designing and arranging clinical trials, writing grants, interacting with related university departments, etc.
So, you know, research stuff rather than patient stuff.
edit: to address your actual question, I have no idea what the numbers for each path look like. A lot of those fields get so interrelated that it probably depend a lot on how you define "medical research." Does genetics count? Genomics? Biomedical engineering, definitely, but what about the material scientists that develop the new dental polymers? It all gets pretty hazy when you drill down on specifics
Edit 2: I also suppose I should say that my experience with science research is almost entirely in public/university research from about a decade back, so current private sector research could vary a lot from my experience. I don't think it's that different though, given what I've heard from friends and coworkers.
hardly the point
We all understand the point. But it's important to question the source. It suggests a gullability, or fabrication.
It was probablly just a list of 20 humanities electives they had to pick 4 of for gen Ed requirements (not say9ng this is a bad thing maybe if there was more of this 1/4 of every engineering class wouldn't go straight to Lockheed martin)
They're supposed to be less rigorous and a little more general than other courses, this is really grasping at straws for a reason to ignore the point being made.
There might have been a less than clear course description. Also, it may have been the lack of sleep.