As I've gotten to do business, negotiations, and dealing with "money" more, I became kind of disillusioned to the power game. It's not always as fun as commonly portrayed and medicine seems like a very demanding but cool job. Maybe the grass is just greener and it gets as boring (if not more due to the lower potential for creativity).
>The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?
"X is just a system! Why is this not automated?" is a common engineer mindset :) Unfortunately, X is just a system is only a good approximation if you don't actually understand much about what's going on. When you actually zoom in on the problem, the rough edges and hidden complexity start to become apparent, and your abstraction is no longer useful.
Computers are incredibly simple machines when compared to most messy real world systems, and we still have a heap of trouble dealing with them.
I actually have hands on experience with EMR (epic) and I can tell you their convoluted solutions only make a complex system worse. As for actual clinical care, all the experience I have is second-hand, through friends and family in the field, but the ones I've talked to have admitted that most of med school is rote learning and bemoaned how easy it is to make mistakes.
That made me laugh big-time even though I can't tell a python script from a boa constrictor.
Later rather than sooner would be much more accurate.
Curiously the MDs I work with have been relatively unanimous about this: there is a variability in cases and you do, in a way, have to be "creative", but in a very limited sense of what that means. "Creative" in your analysis. Some thought that was a boring aspect of the job, some thought that was the whole point.
What kind of creativity could you demonstrate in the OR?