As a college instructor, there is some amount of content (facts, knowledge, skills) that is important for each field, and the amount of content that will be useful in the future varies wildly from field to field edit: and whether you actually enter into a career related to your degree.
However, the overall degree you obtain is supposed to say something about your ability to learn. A bachelor’s degree says you can learn and apply some amount of critical thought when provided a framework. A masters says you can find and critically evaluate sources in order to educate yourself. A PhD says you can find sources, educate yourself, and take that information and apply it to a research situation to learn something no one has ever known before. An MD/engineering degree says you’re essentially a mechanic or a troubleshooter for a specific piece of equipment.
edit 2: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with MD’s and engineers, but they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise, and their opinions should definitely not be given any undue weight. The percentage of doctors and engineers that fall for pseudoscientific bullshit is too fucking high. And don’t get started on pre-meds and engineering students.
I disagree. I am a medical student and there is a lot of critical thinking that goes into it. Humans don’t have error codes and there are a lot of symptoms that are common across many different diagnoses. The critical thinking comes in when you have to talk to the patient to get a history and a list of all the symptoms and complaints, then knowing what to look for on physical exam, and then what labs to order to parse out what the problem is.
You can have a patient tell you that they have a stomachache when what is actually going on is a heart attack. Or they come in complaining of one thing in particular, but that other little annoying thing they didn’t think was worth mentioning is actually the key to figuring out the diagnosis.
And then there’s treatment…Nurse Practitioners are “educated” on a purely algorithmic approach to medicine which means that if you have a patient with comorbidities or contraindications to a certain treatment that aren’t covered on the flow chart, the NP has no goddamn clue what to do with it. A clear example is selecting antibiotics for infections. That is a very complex process that involves memorization, critical thinking, and the ability to research things yourself.
they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise
All of your examples are from “their very narrow area of expertise.”
But if you want a more comprehensive reason why I maintain that MD’s and engineers are not taught to be as rigorous and comprehensive when it comes to skepticism and critical thought, it comes down to the central goals and philosophies of science vs. medicine and engineering. Frankly, it’s all described pretty well by looking at Karl Popper’s doctrine of falsifiability. Scientific studies are designed to falsifiable, meaning scientists are taught to look for the places their hypotheses fail, whereas doctors and engineers are taught to make things work, so once they work, the exceptions tend to be secondary.
I am expected to know and understand all of the risk factors that someone may encounter in their engineering or manufacturing or cooking or whatever line of work, and to know about people’s social lives, recreational activities, dietary habits, substance usage, and hobbies can affect their health. In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it’s my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I’m not saying I know everything about how the world works, or that I know better than you when it comes to medicine, but I know enough to recognize my limits, which is something with which doctors (and engineers) struggle.
Granted, some of these conclusions are due to my anecdotal experience, but there are lots of studies looking at instruction in med school vs grad school that reach the conclusion that medicine is not science specifically because medical schools do not emphasize skepticism and critical thought to the same extent that science programs do. I’ll find some studies and link them when I’m not on mobile.
This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it’s my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I’m not claiming to know all of these things. I’m not pretending that I do, but there is still an expectation that I know what kinds of health problems my patients are at risk for based on their lifestyle. I’m better off in this area than a lot of my classmates because I didn’t go straight from kindergarten through medical school. My undergraduate degree is in history and I worked in tech for a while before going back to school. My hobbies are all over the place, including having done blacksmithing with my Dad when I was a kid. I have significantly more life experience than most of my classmates, so I have a leg up on being familiar with these things.
I know that there is a lot that I don’t know which is why my approach to medicine is that I will be studying and learning until the day I retire. I have a pretty good idea of where my limits are and when to call a specialist for things I’m not sure about. I make a point to learn as much as I can from everyone, patients, other physicians, my friends, random folks on the street/internet…everyone.
For example, I know from watching a dumb youtube channel about some of the weird chemicals that someone who worked as an armorer in the Army would have been exposed to that can have some serious health effects, but that wasn’t something that was explicitly covered in my formal medical school education. I have friends in the Navy and they’re the ones that told me about the weird fertility effects of working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The Naval medical academy did a study on it, but I would have never had the inclination to go read that study if I hadn’t heard about it from my friends. The list goes on. There’s so many things that are important for me to know that will never be covered in our lectures in school and wouldn’t even come up as things to learn about if I didn’t learn about them from other people.
As a college instructor, there is some amount of content (facts, knowledge, skills) that is important for each field, and the amount of content that will be useful in the future varies wildly from field to field edit: and whether you actually enter into a career related to your degree.
However, the overall degree you obtain is supposed to say something about your ability to learn. A bachelor’s degree says you can learn and apply some amount of critical thought when provided a framework. A masters says you can find and critically evaluate sources in order to educate yourself. A PhD says you can find sources, educate yourself, and take that information and apply it to a research situation to learn something no one has ever known before. An MD/engineering degree says you’re essentially a mechanic or a troubleshooter for a specific piece of equipment.
edit 2: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with MD’s and engineers, but they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise, and their opinions should definitely not be given any undue weight. The percentage of doctors and engineers that fall for pseudoscientific bullshit is too fucking high. And don’t get started on pre-meds and engineering students.
I disagree. I am a medical student and there is a lot of critical thinking that goes into it. Humans don’t have error codes and there are a lot of symptoms that are common across many different diagnoses. The critical thinking comes in when you have to talk to the patient to get a history and a list of all the symptoms and complaints, then knowing what to look for on physical exam, and then what labs to order to parse out what the problem is.
You can have a patient tell you that they have a stomachache when what is actually going on is a heart attack. Or they come in complaining of one thing in particular, but that other little annoying thing they didn’t think was worth mentioning is actually the key to figuring out the diagnosis.
And then there’s treatment…Nurse Practitioners are “educated” on a purely algorithmic approach to medicine which means that if you have a patient with comorbidities or contraindications to a certain treatment that aren’t covered on the flow chart, the NP has no goddamn clue what to do with it. A clear example is selecting antibiotics for infections. That is a very complex process that involves memorization, critical thinking, and the ability to research things yourself.
All of your examples are from “their very narrow area of expertise.”
But if you want a more comprehensive reason why I maintain that MD’s and engineers are not taught to be as rigorous and comprehensive when it comes to skepticism and critical thought, it comes down to the central goals and philosophies of science vs. medicine and engineering. Frankly, it’s all described pretty well by looking at Karl Popper’s doctrine of falsifiability. Scientific studies are designed to falsifiable, meaning scientists are taught to look for the places their hypotheses fail, whereas doctors and engineers are taught to make things work, so once they work, the exceptions tend to be secondary.
I am expected to know and understand all of the risk factors that someone may encounter in their engineering or manufacturing or cooking or whatever line of work, and to know about people’s social lives, recreational activities, dietary habits, substance usage, and hobbies can affect their health. In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it’s my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I’m not saying I know everything about how the world works, or that I know better than you when it comes to medicine, but I know enough to recognize my limits, which is something with which doctors (and engineers) struggle.
Granted, some of these conclusions are due to my anecdotal experience, but there are lots of studies looking at instruction in med school vs grad school that reach the conclusion that medicine is not science specifically because medical schools do not emphasize skepticism and critical thought to the same extent that science programs do. I’ll find some studies and link them when I’m not on mobile.
edit: Here’s an op-ed from a professor at the University of Washington Medical School. Study 1. Study 2.
I’m not claiming to know all of these things. I’m not pretending that I do, but there is still an expectation that I know what kinds of health problems my patients are at risk for based on their lifestyle. I’m better off in this area than a lot of my classmates because I didn’t go straight from kindergarten through medical school. My undergraduate degree is in history and I worked in tech for a while before going back to school. My hobbies are all over the place, including having done blacksmithing with my Dad when I was a kid. I have significantly more life experience than most of my classmates, so I have a leg up on being familiar with these things.
I know that there is a lot that I don’t know which is why my approach to medicine is that I will be studying and learning until the day I retire. I have a pretty good idea of where my limits are and when to call a specialist for things I’m not sure about. I make a point to learn as much as I can from everyone, patients, other physicians, my friends, random folks on the street/internet…everyone.
For example, I know from watching a dumb youtube channel about some of the weird chemicals that someone who worked as an armorer in the Army would have been exposed to that can have some serious health effects, but that wasn’t something that was explicitly covered in my formal medical school education. I have friends in the Navy and they’re the ones that told me about the weird fertility effects of working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The Naval medical academy did a study on it, but I would have never had the inclination to go read that study if I hadn’t heard about it from my friends. The list goes on. There’s so many things that are important for me to know that will never be covered in our lectures in school and wouldn’t even come up as things to learn about if I didn’t learn about them from other people.