I disagree with this strongly. Isolated individual facts don’t give you an overview or macro-structure to place the facts within. It’s very inefficient. Can only speak for medicine but using another persons deck is ‘quicker’ but performance is so much worse. Even in just learning how to summarise the info for yourself you gain a lot.
I am also speaking from experience with medicine, there is no way I can create cards as good as Anking's and still have time left to actually study/review.
Sorry what? The NHS is free. There is no Medicare. Private health insurance is a luxury, it’s basically a queue jump to see the same doctors often in the same hospital as the NHS offers. Pricing is transparent because they just send you to the NHS for non profitable stuff. And if the test were necessary + urgent you’d get it free in the NHS anyway.
In fact the awful incentives it creates mainly just lead to lots of unnecessary tests. That’s why insurance often won’t pay.
The NHS is indeed free, but I was not referring to treatment by the NHS. If you are adult with slipped disc, torn muscle or hernia or other no serious issues then good luck trying to be treated on the NHS. The waiting list is usually two or three years. I was referring to the numerous private hospitals existing in London, where you can see a health specialist within days (it sounds like a luxury in britian, but really is the norm in most countries even heavy sanctioned ones like Cuba and Iran)
Completely true. Killer stats on this:
1 in 7 U.K. trained doctors work abroad
The number of GP training places are up 2000 and number of qualified GPs hasn’t changed due to poor retention.
I could go on and on.
U.K. medicine is a shitshow of poor pay and poor retention. Even the cheap imported doctors are only staying a short time due to the chaos of the system and better ops back home once NHS training is on your CV
The main justifiable complaint by junior doctors is that of being over-worked. Unfortunately the OP and the link above suggest that this is a problem partly self-inflicted by the profession itself.
There isn't a great risk of emigration by UK-trained doctors, as evidenced by an over-subscription for training places. Further, OECD data show that when adjusted to average national salaries, the pay scales for clinicians in the UK are competitive with the main destinations, including Australia, Canada and NZ [0].
A large part of the solution would appear to be increasing undergraduate medical education and further professional training slots. This would need increased government funding as well as agreement from professional bodies.
This implies PAs are at half the level of an MD but the difference is astronomical. Those 4000 MD hours are training to be a physician, the 2000 are training to be a PA which is a much simpler role. If PA school went to 8000h doing what they do currently to train wouldn’t get you near an MD (not to mention the talent of the intake, rigour of exams and depth/ breadth of knowledge required).
For anyone else who’s drinking at this level (a litre a day of vodka) please don’t quit cold turkey without seeing a doctor. It genuinely can be lethal. There are temporary medications that dramatically mitigate that risk.
This is why I mentioned how dangerous and stupid it was. I experienced DTs for several days, and seizures. I’m lucky to have made it through that alive.
Misunderstanding here. The question is at what age is the base rate in the population sufficiently high that a test with a certain sensitivity and specificity useful net risks. Multiple studies have shown that these screening programmes don’t have a huge impact on mortality - excluding lead time bias etc. and noting the c. 10 in 100k extra cases of cancer caused by the screening. Here’s a review for prostate screening that’s even more damning about its usefulness - https://med-fom-urlgsci.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2007/06/P-ca-...
MRI scans take longer, are often more uncomfortable for the patient (being in an enclosed, noisy machine), require much larger capital investment than an X-ray (and therefore supply is more limited), and have a higher cost per exam than an X-ray.
It almost certainly would be possible to use MRI for screening, but the impact would be a reduction in availability and a higher cost.
This is an ill informed take. It’s common when someone doesn’t know what X role does from the outside to think they are interchangeable.
Medical school takes candidates that are already on average much stronger than NP trainees and then trains them more rigorously.
Further, the specific training pathway after medical/ nursing school is v different.
NPs are trained in seeing ‘textbook’ or standard cases and a flowchart of management for them. Which is great if you are one of them. And since most people present ‘typically’ for that clinic you can use NPs to filter through people and get them seem quickly/ cheaply. However, they don’t have the toolkit to handle greater complexity that is outside the flowchart and don’t generally know how recognise when a standard flowchart approach to management shouldn’t apply.
It’s rather tough to explain in lay terms other than via analogy - you’ve basically said all software engineers should be replaced by data analysts.
No, it's like saying all programmers should be replaced by certified programmers who are all from good families and have 10 years of intense training at top schools and massive debt.
You wouldn't trust some young immigrant or a long haired hippy kid who dropped out of college and started a business in his garage to provide your tech would you? Computers are complicated, we can't let amateurs in hoodies start doing things without some central control.
NP/PA education is far less rigorous And requires far less hours than MD. Many more NP/PA schools have far more lax standards, and are probably better called diploma mills than MD schools.
It is all probabilities, and I would rather bet on an MD. At least compared to the current incarnation of NP/PA.
The problem of NP/PA is not in the design or scalar length of education. It is in the credentialing. MDs have to take MCAT and step exams, which I know weed out many people. From my understanding, there is a relatively very low barrier to entry for NP/PA.
As a side note, the physician credentialing process of the US is far too long.
I doubt those exams select for skilled medical practitioners any more than leetcode interviews select for productive programmers.
In my own experience, I've seen several very good NPs and several very bad MDs.
> the physician credentialing process of the US is far too long.
Also too expensive and too abusive. It tends to select for people who are willing to put up with almost anything in exchange for the status of being an MD, not for people who are motivated to provide quality care for their patients.
I don’t know that you can use the acceptance rate as a direct comparison to med school, you have different populations applying to each.
I remember there was a PA that did end up going to med school and took the PA boards (forget what they call it) just for kicks and ended up scoring in the 99th percentile.
What's the probability you are optimising though? That you as a rich person can get access to the artificially limited supply of <good thing>? Or that society in general gets access to <good thing>?
America has a stereotype that British people have bad teeth. They also have a stereotype that poor American "hillbillies" have even worse teeth. The stats suggest that on average the Brits have better teeth but I'd guess Dentists can make more money by moving from there to the country with the worse teeth on average and helping the Americans with good teeth have even better teeth.
Part of the problem with the current monopoly is that we're already assuming our choices are NPs vs MDs, as opposed to some other professional identities, with other educational paths, that don't exist because of the monopoly. It's distorted the discussion by shaping our expectations about what's possible.
In any event, med schools are now moving towards 1.5 or even 1 year of course training, there's pressure to compress background as much as possible. The difference between, say, a PA with four years of practice and a second year resident is increasingly difficult to distinguish. This is increasingly reflected in staffing demands.
I don't think the MD model is obsolete, but I do agree that the current anticompetitive system is.
