> I completely disagree that barely trained hyperspecialists would be sufficient.
>While specialization is coming to all of Medicine, we tend to cluster by body region/disease state, rather than by modality.
These are contradictory statements. If Doctors typically go:
No Training -> Trained in everything -> Specialized in body region/disease state
You can easily go:
No Training -> Trained in body region/disease state -> Specialized in body region/disease state
So even if we assume it's not possible to specialize radiologists any further than they already are we can still cut the training time and difficulty.
>We have to know how referring clinicians will treat disease, and know the major complications to look out for on imaging. We discuss their treatment plans during tumor boards and need to speak the language of the treating teams so we can tailor our interpretations to be useful. We need to know both physiology and pathophys when interpreting imaging to know how disease manifests and what is abnormal versus post therapy related change.
No one is denying that there are things in medicine that are complicated and require very skilled people. What you describe is the end state of a fully educated and experienced doctor. Medicine is more or less the only field that makes you become that before you start working. Can you take a reasonably smart person off the street and have him designing plans to treat tumors in a year? No. Can you take that person and train them to identify normal appearing lungs vs cancerous ones in that time? Probably. And can that person learn on the job and develop the ability to design a treatment plan over the course of 10 years working? For sure. And they wouldn't learn everything taught in Med school. They would pick up only the things relevant to the job they are trying to perform.
>All of medical knowledge is iterative. Unlike programming, you can’t just abstract the low-level programming. The premedical curriculum provides the baseline knowledge to understand pharmacology, which is essential when trying to understand our interventions in physiology and pathophysiology. We need to know both physiology and pathophys when interpreting imaging to know how disease manifests and what is abnormal versus post therapy related change.
Going back to the comment that kicked this all off. If I handed you a cellular biology final from Med school do you think you'd be able to pass it? What about the USMLE?
>There are no easy shortcuts here. NPs and PAs are a living experiment at a shortcut, but what I see day in and day out is that the people they consult (radiology and pathology) need to know even more clinical medicine to help the inexperienced NP or PA in knowing what to do when something happens that deviates from the protocol. Many many many times I will call with a semi-urgent unexpected finding, and just get silence on the other end of the phone. They don’t know what to do, whereas on weekends or nights when I get residents or attendings, I don’t hear this complete absence of understanding.
Every other field has the ability to take inexperienced people and make them experienced. There's no reason medicine can't do the same. Your clueless NP and PA should have more experienced people to go to for help when they experience something new. The next time they get that call they wouldn't be as clueless.