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Comment by FigurativeVoid | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit of a radical on this, but we should basically remove traditional college from the whole medical school pipeline. When I think of my friends that went to med school, they all took the MCAT after two years of school. That seems like a great indication that the last two years aren't important[1]. Two years of fundamental sciences, and then right into med school.

Also, we have some many people that want to be doctors. We should let them all start medical school, and let them get weeded out from there.

[1] the caveat here is research. But MD/PhD fits far better into the traditional college pipeline.

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That's not a radical proposal.

The US and Canada are globally unique in requiring a 4 year bachelors before 4 more years of med school. Every other OECD country has a single 5-6 year program available straight out of high school.

https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-case-for-shortening-medic...

Other nations have longer post-graduate training requirements, sometimes including compulsory national service. For many specialties, a US high school grad will be fully qualified before her UK peer

It'd be an amazing start.

A stupid amount of my wife's medical education was completely wasted for two reasons:

* "To make sure you know what career to go into". No. You don't need 2 years to see every possible option. Everyone has some idea before they even go to med school. Focus on the 2 to 6 that you care about.

* Residency application. 4th year was a complete joke. Most of it was consumed with travel/distractions while applying to residency. Maybe 2 or 3 months of actual learning fit in their.

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The med school my wife's residency is associated with is actually a 3 year program. They skip summers and condense a lot of information.

Wow, that seems so short then. In Europe medical school is 6 years, with a 7th year spent on preparing for residency. At least in Spain. And it doesn't start off easy. All student are required to have spent the last 2 years of high school in a science-focused baccalaureate program, which in my experience is similar to early American undergraduate in terms of academic rigour.

In Europe you go to medical school immediately after high school, but it takes longer, so ends up similar to what you're proposing I think.

I think that they have a much harder high school process, but yes

I strongly agree. That's what the European system is like, as others have mentioned. Even the 2 years of fundamental science preparation. In Spain, what I would say is the academic equivalent of high-school ends at 16. 16-18 is then spent in "baccalaureate", an optional university preparation program, which is more rigorous and ends in nationally-administered university preparedness exam. A prospective medical student would need to do the science-based variant of this program.

I agree, and I also think it would be OK if there are different “levels” of doctors. I also think that diagnostic tests will have to carry more of the load as opposed to relying on the doctors judgment. This could mean more imaging processed by AI.

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