[lilsoso]

We should enforce rigorous qualifications for doctors. We've relaxed the standards far too much already.

[bell-cot]

What sort of qualifications? 99th percentile talent in subjects like organic chemistry, which are actually not used by 99% of doctors in the real world? Willingness to work themselves so long and hard that their judgement is usually substantially impaired?

And does the (my impression) widespread support for oh-so-rigorous qualifications for doctors reflect any real-world data about actual resulting quality of patient care? Or is it a way for prospective patients to vocalize a bunch of anxieties and emotions about medical care, plus a way for the doctors who've had to endure such treatment to say "all the noobs should have to suffer as much as I did"?

[xkcd1963]

If your doctor is more clueless than you that speaks of itself.

[casenmgreen]

We do not need all doctors to be uber doctors.

We need a range of doctors, who range in price according to quality.

That way for simple stuff, which anyone can get right, we go to a cheap, reasonable doctor.

A similar example would be if we only had uber software engineers. Each one had to have a PhD. There were no cheap and okay developers who could do say web-sites but not write a programming language from scratch.

[nradov]

That is not even remotely viable. There is little or no correlation between price and quality in healthcare. There are no reliable ways to accurately measure quality of individual doctors across the full spectrum of services that they deliver. In particular, it doesn't make sense to just look at outcomes because the doctors who take on more difficult cases will always look worse in the metrics regardless of the quality of care that they deliver.

Your example doesn't even make sense. Having a PhD doesn't make software engineers more productive on average. PhD programs train researchers. Research skills have very little correlation with practical software engineering.

What could actually work is to train more physician assistants and nurse practitioners, then have them deliver the bulk of simple primary care services under the supervision of physicians. This is more cost effective and usually works well enough, although there may be some degradation in service quality for edge cases.

[starluz]

Well what we are learning is that we don’t need doctors for the simple stuff. The doctors cap honestly make sense. We have a surplus of generalists who still do not understand the body systematically, so the demand is not there

[Wowfunhappy]

I think you're possibly describing nurse practitioners?

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Lol. Vary by price? This screams USA. Cost, even of labour, is very much disconnected from patient outcomes.

[CydeWeys]

Have we though? You got any source on that? There's already a severe shortage of doctors, so what happens if standards are significantly increased?

Having a doctor available to treat you at all is still much better than having your very high standards and then not having a doctor available period.

[GuB-42]

Sure, but no doctors is worse than lower skilled doctors as even lower skilled doctors are better than the average patient self-treatment attempt.

We need doctors who are available to treat simple conditions and refer to a more qualified doctor for the complex ones. Such a job doesn't require being a genius, just people who are not complete idiots, and the qualifications required here are genius-level, not idiotproof-level.

[throwaway2037]

    > We need doctors who are available to treat simple conditions and refer to a more qualified doctor for the complex ones.

This is most medical systems work in highly industrialised nations. First, you visit a GP. If necessary the send you to a specialist.

[mcmoor]

I don't know, lower skilled doctors can be quite a pseudo science amplifier at worst. Sometimes it does feel like that no doctor is better lower skilled one, especially when self treatment (or more accurately, remote treatment) is getting better nowadays.

[amluto]

I suspect that, after some point, making the qualifications stricter actually drives away many of the best candidates.

[throwaway2037]

I doubt it. They pay is high enough to attract more people than necessary. Most ultra high income jobs are the same.

[archagon]

Qualifications should come at the end of your education, not at the start.

[Wowfunhappy]

Educating doctors is really expensive. It would really suck to invest all that money in someone (or in yourself) just for them to fail a final test or whatever.

For what it's worth, I do agree we should train more doctors, but I think it's a complicated problem.

[dmead]

this is completely wrong. there are not enough doctors at all levels. not everyone is going to be a brain surgeon.