Are Modern Doctors Underqualified?

Two posts in two days, I know, whats going on?
Recently I've been wondering if in the past few years medical training has become watered down, leaving junior doctors less medically and scientifically astute than in previous generations. I have no personal basis for comparison, of course, I'm only 21 and didn't happen to train in the 1960s in a past incarnation. But I know what the older doctors have told me, and I know what I've read in books and newspapers, written in jest or not. It seems like gradually over the past ten years or so medical school has been transformed. It used to be a industrial-age workhouse of penniless, sleep-deprived students who spent hour upon hour on the wards, seeing patient after patient in an endless drive to widen the scope and clarity of their medical knowledge. When they weren't at the hospital, they had their heads conveniently shoved inside a textbook. And junior doctors had it just as bad, working 50 hour shifts (honestly) for very average money and even less respect.
Nowadays, at least in my opinion, it's gotten easier. We still work very hard, it's true, but it doesn't seem like much compared to back then. If I fancy an afternoon off, hell, even a week off, I can make excuses and nobody will hold a grudge. Exams require 50% marks to pass, and although we revise like crazy and take them seriously I can't help thinking that they aren't hard enough to discern us as good enough for the job. And from me, always hard working but occasional a failing student, it means something.
We have a wider scope of subjects to learn about these days though, but many of these subjects, like communication skills, lend themselves to exceptionally easy exam questions and no form of efficient learning process. In turn, we learn less about the bread and butter of medicine, common diseases and normal physiology.
Why do I care, you might ask. Of course, it would be easier for me to become a doctor today than it would have 50 years ago, and not just because today's government makes it much easier for student from average-income families to progress into higher education. But if I had to choose between being a grossly under qualified doctor or not a doctor at all, I'd have to side with the latter.
I feel like I've missed out on an era, on a brotherhood of silent suffering, but suffering rewarded by feeling like you'd really achieved something. I feel like I'm drifting through medical school, and that the effort I do put in is simply optional at times.
I might be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, maybe medical school is as hard as it ever was and I just happen to not be feeling the stress of it all. But it doesn't seem likely.

The Pressure is on : BrownCom 3

Sorry I've been away so long, I've been shallowly trying to convince myself that staring into the middle-distance and dreaming of sleep actually counts as revision simply because I'm in the library. In truth, I've done a fair bit, but as usual it's all been slightly rushed and poor concentration has led to a jumble of unspecific, unrelated facts becoming the peak of my theoretical prowess.

My shit-yourself-o-meter has been increased accordingly, with the exams only 2 weeks away. Every other course has finished, and a lot of my friends have now completed their degrees and are out job-hunting with their 2:1s. Ah, money, I believe I remember what that looks like.

On the plus side, my mock practical exam went okay. Failing is nearly impossible because they give you half the marks you need to pass if you simply act in the polite manner and are "sympathetic" to the pateint while you make up some random lie-answers to their questions because you have no fucking clue.

Basically, I should be fine, unless we get an absolute bastard of a question in the essay-format exam.

I've said that before.....

Jesus Saves!

Only kidding. In fact, just when you thought the Catholic Church couldn't get much more sanctimonious, they've found a new way to oppress poor vulnerable people with their faceless ethics. I don't think abortion is right or wrong, I just don't think it's their place to go telling people what to do with their lives in times of high emotional stress, simply because it's what they think. We're not all brainwashed into living by a list of ancient rules like do not covet they neighbour's ass. Fine, it has a modern translation, but Catholics only translate they Bible into what they want it to say anyway, so it doesn't matter.

So that's right, only the people that follow their pre-written, arbitrary rules to the letter deserve to be happy, regardless of what situation they find themselves in. Just follow the rules, it's what an all-seeing, omnipresent God would want.

It makes me sick.

Exam Shit-Yourself-O-Meter

Just to display my internal sense of crapping my pants in the build up to my Intermediate exams, I've designed a lovely meter so you lay people can see how I'm really feeling. As you can see, it's currently set on "Unpleasant Rumblings", but it's sure to go up soon. I'm pretty confident that the only reason I'm feeling so secure right now is that this morning I sat through a teaching session next to the world's worst medical student. One of the answers she didn't know was "inferior", so I tried to mouth it to her to help her out. Or to describe her ability in comparison to the rest of us. That's what you get it you only turn up once every 2 weeks, I suppose.

Crack open the Bubbly

I checked the calendar, it's not my birthday yet. But I suppose there's nothing wrong with an unexpected surprise every now and then, so join me in a toast to a rare moment of satisfaction with world events.

Here's an Idea...

I'm going to get drunk. Very drunk. I'm going to hang around in the clubs of L.A., getting totally wasted whilst the paparazzi hang on my every move and slurred word.
Then, I'm going to go home, get into my disgustingly polluting 4x4, and drive around for a while.
It doesn't matter if I get caught.
It doesn't matter if I hit someone, and kill them.
It doesn't matter if I get sentenced to 40 days in jail, my lawyers will get that down to 20. Then when I complain about the conditions (not enough butlers) my lawyers will exchange it for a ludicrous 40-day home electronic tagging, so I can be amongst my friends, family, antique furniture and miniature dogs as I comes to terms with what a terrible thing I've done.
Hey, if that's a problem, my Daddy can probably reduce it to some cushy community service order for which I'll have to work for about 20 minutes.
It's fine, because money can buy anything.
It's fine, because I'm arrogant, stupid and absolutely unaware of how much people hate me.
It's fine, because I'm Paris Hilton.

Surgery, Simply Contradictory

I'm actually holding somebody's guts. I have my hands on the slippery entrails of an actual human being. At the top end, half of the stomach is connected to the end of the small intestine, and most of the pancreas is attached to the middle. A gall bladder lies in another bowl close by. As I squeeze the head of the pancreas, I can feel a rough, gristled lump deep inside the tissue. That's why they've all been removed. Cancer.
A Whipple Procedure is a perfect demonstration of how both medicine in general and surgery in particular can be so conceptually simple yet so practically complex. The problem and the solution, on paper, are child's play- the patient has a tumour in their pancreas, so we get the surgeons to chop it out, and the surrounding bits too just to make sure the disease hasn't spread. We join the loose ends of the gut back up, and hey presto, we've cured you.
If only it were that easy. The whole thing takes around 4 hours, if you don't count the 10 years training you need to be able to run the show. I got tired just watching it, but in between his countless references to dogging, swinging, boobs and rugby, my consultant was able to get through the whole thing with minimal fuss, and still save a small amount of patience to teach me.
You could compare it with plumbing, simply removing the rusty, damaged old pipes, plugging the leaks and fixing the working pipes together again, but that denies it an intense theoretical basis. There are a million things that could go wrong, but they usually don't. And the human body is not as hardy as a set of pipes. You shouldn't be able to hack out the best part of half of the digestive system and see the patient up and about in a few days. But you can.
That's because the surgeons themselves are as enigmatic and contradictory as the artform itself. As my consultant stitches the hepatic duct onto a section of jejunum, effectively restoring the patient's ability to digest food, he asks me if I'm attached. I say "yes, for nearly two and a half years".
He guides the remaining portion of the stomach back onto the bowel with the fine detail of a seasoned professional. He asks what I like about her. I think of "chatty, sociable, sympathetic" and other such adjectives off the top of my head.
He continues to insert an enteral feeding tube into the gut in case of emergency, with great accuracy and dexterity.
"Is she from a rich family?" He continues in his inquisition.
"Not really.....", I reply.
"Bin her", he snaps, and begins to close the incision.