What happens beyond information gathering during the usual eight years of medical training? David Kopacz, MD believes that medical training dehumanizes young doctors, and I agree with him.
Is the dehumanizing process accidental? If not, what purpose does dehumanization serve?
When doctors are trained to be automatons, mechanically doing what they're told without questioning why or what for, one wonders: who benefits from these well-trained medical middlemen?
Doctors so "well-trained" that they can be manipulated into thoughtlessly prescribing opioids, ignoring the obvious risks for dependency, and creating an opioid epidemic.
Doctors who have stopped wondering: is there an alternative approach? But instead, they write antipsychotic prescriptions to children without knowing their long-term effects or how to safely withdraw patients from any of the medications they prescribe.
Doctors quick to call other clinicians "quacks" because they lack "evidence-based medicine," without the humility to acknowledge the lack of long-term evidence for their own approaches.
In my opinion, it's a crime against humanity, but an extremely lucrative one. Today, I want to give you a peek inside the ivory towers of a medical training facility. It all begins with how medicine questions.
p.s. Starting next week, the podcast teaser will post on Wednesday, along with the link to the full episode. This weekly Holistic Update will continue to post every Thursday.
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How Medicine Questions
Determines Its Answers
For the first two years of medical training, from early morning to late in the evening, a medical student absorbs information in darkened auditoriums, quiet libraries, or microscoped laboratories.
And every week, they must take several multiple-choice tests with other equally smart students. Each test covers medical material that would easily span three months of undergraduate study.
Over the course of two years, they are tested on and expected to know the answers to thousands of questions.
After taking these tests, their scores are either publically posted or privately provided—always ranked in comparison to other students in the medical school class. This stimulates enough competition and hierarchy to create a sense of isolation, shame, and self-doubt.
Once, during my first year of medical school, I was overjoyed to get 100% on a biochemistry test. However, when I looked at my ranking, I discovered that everyone in the class got 100% except one "poor" soul who got a score in the 90's.
Brainwashing takes skill. One must exhaust and overwhelm a person and break down their identity. What is at the core of many medical students' identities? Intelligence.
Medical training grinds its students down until they are exhausted, afraid, and insecure. And that's just the beginning.
During the third and fourth years, medical students move on to their clinical rotations. I remember anticipating the shift with excitement. I innocently believed I would be able to ask the attendings questions and learn from their wealth of empirical experiences. However, that is not how it works.
There's a perverted version of the Socratic method in medical school during the clinical years called, "pimping." It desecrates everything that a true Socratic approach embodies, and, understandably, has just the opposite effect on critical thinking.
During morning rounds the attending will ask questions of the medical students, like giving a pop quiz on the entire field of their specialty. The student is expected to know the right answer. If not, they are publically humiliated.
Instead of assuming the obvious—a student is here to learn—the attending assumes the student should already know everything and only needs proper questioning.
The attending, on the other hand, leaves little time to be questioned on issues that they are unprepared to answer. The whole process grooms medical students to fear questions or the unknown and normalizes a pathological teaching system.
In addition, the process reinforces a hierarchical system that elevates the attending's authority/status/knowledge and reinforces the young doctor's powerlessness/lowliness/self-doubt.
Over time, the incessant, interminable, repetitive barrage of questions trains medical students to need to have the answer to every question. In fact, many develop the delusion that they know the answers, when in fact, they don't.
Soon, the unknown gathers layers upon layers of trauma until it becomes so weighed down with shame, pain, and guilt that it becomes unthinkable.
In the process of training students to regurgitate answers, the medical system fails at teaching them how to ask important questions that challenge or confront the system, like, "Why?" or "Why not?"
Why? What purpose does a hierarchical, militant training approach serve? What organizations or systems ultimately benefit from being able to control or manipulate these well-trained medical doctors?
This is just half of the training process. There are four more years of residency—four more years of exhaustion, calls, and insane expectations. It is no wonder that doctors experience burnout. Who wouldn't be burned out by the end of their training, and for good reasons?
After such a training process, intelligent men and women will do almost anything "medical authority" directs them to do without question. Curiosity has been replaced by a fragile competence, always just a few questions away from incompetence.
Fear coats the foundation of treatment: fear of not knowing, fear of making a mistake, and fear of being wrong.
It's time for us to question not only medicine's training approach but why such a brutal approach continues to exist. Maybe we will find that behind its self-assurance and rigor, medicine does not know how to ask the right questions and therefore, does not know the right answers.
Have a great week!
The Holistic Psychiatrist Podcast (Ep. 61):
My Favorite Supplements for Bipolar Disorder
and Lamictal/Lamotrigine Withdrawal
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What does a holistic psychiatrist use to help resolve bipolar disorder and Lamictal/Lamotrigine withdrawal?
Dr. Lee explains the core issue in bipolar illness from a holistic psychiatric perspective and goes over her favorite supplements for treating bipolar disorder and Lamictal/Lamotrigine withdrawal.
Listen as she goes over each supplement and provides reasons why they are important for healing this difficult condition.
Click here to listen to all of The Holistic Psychiatrist Podcast episodes.
For more about Dr. Lee, please visit:
YouTube: The Holistic Psychiatrist
To schedule consultations or appointments, call her office at 240-437-7600