Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmfdmf | Hacker News Reader

It has been my experience that doctors make horrible businessmen. I think it is the medical school training that encourages over confidence in their abilities, even outside their domain, and a dangerous reluctance or inability to listen to outsiders or experts of lower social status. Perhaps this guy is the exception but I don't think it was the doctor training so much but the fact that high intelligence is general can quickly be applied to any area.

View on HN

Medicine and business are two very different areas with aspects of each that may even seem polar opposite. As a physician, you are taught and trained to approach problems in a very calculating and methodical manner, to avoid risk as much as possible for fear of hurting the patient. Advancing a career in medicine is more academic than anything. You study, take tests, pass them, move up into the next hierarchical structure, repeat. There is always a clearly defined path. You'll find many doctors eventually view other aspects of their lives in a similar way, avoiding risky investments or endeavors that do not provide a clear, concrete, measurable return. Business can often times require you act more on blind faith, to build relationships with others to advance your career often without any hard, demonstrable evidence proving you know what you claim. Marketing, sales, etc, are nowhere nearly as concrete as medicine. You can't measure conversions as well as you can white blood cell count. Two different mindsets and outlooks on life.

Not sure whether docs generally make better, same or worse businessmen, but my experience with medical training taught me to question everything rather than to encourage overconfidence. There's certainly value in artificial confidence in medicine as it applies to most patients, who aren't knowledgeable or alert enough to distill information like you may be able to.

> medical training taught me to question everything...

Certainly this has value but the ability to question everything in an intelligent way is not generalizable. By that I mean that the training in med school includes a huge context of medical knowledge not just this method. The danger and error that I see is that many docs think the method is sufficient without out the context.

> There's certainly value in artificial confidence in medicine as it applies to most patients...

I get it and understand the need. However, in my experience the eventual dupe of the con is not the patient but the doc. I have seen it often enough that it is my default assumption though I have met some good people who happen to be doctors who have not fallen into that trap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com