Assistants

For a long time, I used to be convinced that medical education is expensive, and medical students should be creme de la creme.

The society should, therefore, restrict the number of medical student - which is a necessary procedure for quality control. For the small group of top youngsters that could get through, we could give them a free hand to practice.

"But that policy could not meet the huge demand on health care in the society !" You would object.

No, the majority of the demand are trivial problems that could be well taken care of by pre-defined protocols and semi-skilled people. That's the origin of physician assistants. Nurses in some countries are also allowed to make simple medical decisions and go as far as ordering investigations and making prescription according to in-house protocols. Places with physician assistants and skillful nurse need very few genuine doctors.

And it is plain simple that physician assistants are much cheaper to train (often a two-year diploma course) - and to employ. There's really no glory in it.

But, after all these years, now I come to realize that all we do is training graduates equivalent to physician assistants. That's why they not expected to be competent, not allowed to practice independently, have a low salary, and need to count on their working hours.

Now, you see, medical schools, in their traditional sense, are secretly demolished. The small amount of creme de la creme, if they are silly enough to choose medicine nowadays (it's self conflicting, I know), and if they could distinguish themselves from some surrounding scum that also rises to the top, could only receive genuine training to become competent doctors after they graduate - if there remains a training at all.

Well, maybe that's all what our society (or college) wants.