Why is med school so hard to get into if there is a shortage of doctors?

[Anonymous]

Well, people are picky about their physicians even at low price points. Look at all the comments about One Medical not hiring top tier doctors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Med school is gambling straight up. You have to invest 500K+ no refunds for getting into primary care, no residency or lesser paying fields. Heck no. Hard pass.

And this is why you're not cut out for medicine.

Have not seen any hardworking med students with reasonable aptitude for science and good or better rapport with patients fail to match. Match into a highly competitive surgical subspecialty, different story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Crazy GPA preferences miles ahead of ones needed for Big Law, consulting, banking etc.

You can’t compare office jobs with doctors. They don’t even come close to the importance of what doctors do. The standards need to be kept high.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UGA is opening a med school in Athens

The Rhode Island legislature just voted to open a new med school at URI.

[Anonymous]

It’s not just medical school- they aren’t enough residency spots to train doctors (esp in urban areas where most when to train).

Medical school is not like other grad schools, it’s really expensive to train a doctor. Durng the coursework time, you need specialists and phds in every field rotating to teach doctors, anatomy specialists, standardized actors to practice the physical exam and communication skills + test prep specialists (we take 2 major boards during medical school that you have to pass to even graduate.) then when you get to rotations, there is liability insurance since you are working with real patients and you have to have enough specialists/exposures available for all the students to rotate through various specialities. So it’s not simple, you need to have the infrastructure in place.

I think for example nurse practitioner schools don’t have as may stringent requirements and sometimes students have to find their own preceptors. Medical school is heavily heavily regulated so that limits growth

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because it's cheaper to farm in a bunch of Indian and Chinese med school graduates.

Or Caribbean

Not Chinese, but yes to the other too. Chinese doctors mostly stay in China.

India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Caribbean schools is where Americans get the cheap MDs.

[Anonymous]

It’s all about the money. Fewer doctors means that doctors make more money. They are a hot commodity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Med school is gambling straight up. You have to invest 500K+ no refunds for getting into primary care, no residency or lesser paying fields. Heck no. Hard pass.

And this is why you're not cut out for medicine.

Have not seen any hardworking med students with reasonable aptitude for science and good or better rapport with patients fail to match. Match into a highly competitive surgical subspecialty, different story.

Agree. As long as one attends an MD program in the US, the match rate is 97%-99%, higher with the more selective med schools. At T25 med schools it is essentially 100% even for the most desired specialties. That’s what top med schools do, they give all attendees the option to match into anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are plenty of doctors, just no one the average American would want to see. I know I’m not the only one that looks at a doctors credentials and skip over any that have a degree from an unknown school or one from the Caribbean.
On the flipside, I took my dd to a pediatric practice that had 3 Harvard grads and one from Cornell. Saw all of them before moving on. They were terrible. I told one in private to subtly bring up my dd’s weight problem and the first thing she told her was “your mom is worried about your weight gain”. Another one ignored a symptom that was later diagnosed as something serious, and the 3rd one couldn’t have been more disinterested.
So we have a lot of doctors but many of them are not that good.

You don't need an Ivy League educated physician to get your kid to stop stuffing her face.

Looks like the Ivy Leaguers didn’t have the critical thinking skills to help the parent help her child. Sometimes a doctor can provide more motivation than a parent would. You know that, right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Med school is gambling straight up. You have to invest 500K+ no refunds for getting into primary care, no residency or lesser paying fields. Heck no. Hard pass.

Even primary care can easily pay off the debt if you're willing to work rural for a while.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Its a real problem. Additionally, they bring immigrants into these residency spots from overseas schools, further limiting the number of spots available to Americans.

The only residencies doing this are the ones no American med student wants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s all about the money. Fewer doctors means that doctors make more money. They are a hot commodity.

But it’s not fewer doctors, it’s more immigrant doctors. More patients struggling to communicate with doctors whose accents they can’t understand. More distrust between Americans and doctors who come from far away and seem to have nothing in common with them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Crazy GPA preferences miles ahead of ones needed for Big Law, consulting, banking etc.

Stupid lawyers and bankers can screw up the economy and your life. Stupid doctors can literally kill you. I am glad Medical School is challenging and difficult to get excepted into.

[Anonymous]

Sorry “accepted” not excepted obviously.

[Anonymous]

Open the floodgates. Let the industrious and fairly smart ones migrate in to tackle the artificial shortage of medical professionals . We have done that in Tech/ Engineering then why not medical?
Median Eng professional IQ= median doctor IQ+ 20. It ain’t that hard!
We don’t have such quota for engineers . Bar corrupt AMA from engaging in constraining supply of docs.
US spends twice the OECD avg on medical care. Uncle SAM is drowning in debt .Bust the balls ( US needs even more docs due to aging demographics.