Making a mistake or a reasonable but ultimately incorrect call is not malpractice. Doctors are just people, just like the rest of us, and certainly you. It’s scary if you think that the medical system is more of a safety net than it actually is, but your gripe is with the precarious nature of life, not medicine.
Figuring out how to be a doctor by faking it til you make it most definitely is malpractice though, and ‘don’t worry, you’re an imposter but you only learn by screwing up’ is very much not how doctors learn their job.
The Hippocratic oath is not ‘first, do some harm, as long as you’re learning’.
Show me a hospital, and I'll show you overworked, under slept young doctors that have to deal with paper work, and are swimming in a field with heavy lobbying.
But even without this, the thing is, when you don't know, you will make mistakes.
And when your job is to take care of people, mistakes hurt them.
It's the nature of things.
Last year I had 3 medical errors, one that almost got me killed, by very well-meaning professionals.
Closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't happen is naive at best.
But people have to start somewhere. They can't stay in theory forever. And no amount of preparation will save you from making terrible mistakes.
Since we can't put an experienced doctor behind every intern 24/7, there is no real solution to this for now.
The medical industrial complex clearly thinks it is, otherwise there would drastically lower patient loads, allow more spots for medical school, and provide better working conditions that would allow for fewer mistakes. None of this is happening and is an implicit acceptance of medical error deaths
They obviously do. Just look at the way they run residency programs. They work those poor kids to the bone under minimal supervision. Only the most disingenuous can pretend it's an accident when something goes wrong. The system is clearly designed to harm people.
You think they're called practices because of the less common usage of the term to mean an amateur learning something, to imply they're inexperienced/without training?
Rather than it being the place where a practitioner works? ("someone whose regular work has involved a lot of training")
Planes and bridges are problems where the quality control can be centralized and you can therefore put a lot of redundancy.
Even then, the Boeing scandal shows it's not bulletproof.
It's not the same for medicine. There are way more doctors than you can put safety nets. Also, when a plane crashes, it's on the news, it costs money and PR. Much less so with doctors.
The plane industry is not inherently more moral, just more liable. Responsibility in the health industry is way more diluted.
It's not that we WANT to pay the price of people learning. I wish I would not have had the wrong meds given to me last year.
It's just that the system is not currently set up to do it otherwise.
So you can feel guilty and stop moving, and you will not learn. You will not grow. And you will actually hurt people for a longer period because you will still make mistakes.
Or you can own it and accept the inevitable: doing things means having actual consequences on the world.
If you want, you can dedicate your life to change the whole system and make it better. But I don't think anybody in this thread is doing that right now.
I did see a lot of people on their high horses, but doing nothing though, paralyzed because they were looking for a way to never break anything.
However, normalizing the loss of human life as part of the learning algorithm is psychopathic. There's a time and a place to make mistakes... In mission critical situations that's in training and everywhere else we should aspire for safeguards that prevent the loss of life due to mistakes.
In medicine a lot of these deaths can be prevented through greater care. It's not different than engineering in that respect. The greater problem is decision makers putting profits over life. And this kind of mentality in this thread is just fuel for that kind of behavior. It's gross.
I think you're misreading a singular opinion as occurring between two disparate points here.
The initial phrase was
> doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them
It's then a separate reply from someone else about deaths from errors/malpractice.
So, nobody seems to be expressing the mentality you are, correctly, lambasting (at least so far as I've read in the comments). But, as it is relevant to the lessons we'd all want to pass back to ourselves (in my opinion, it's because we wish to hold ourselves accountable to said lessons for the future), let's address the elephant in the comment.
Normalising deaths, especially the preventable ones, is absolutely not something that anybody here is suggesting (so far as my read of the situation is).
Normalising responsibility, by recognising that we can cause harm and so do something about it, that seems far more in-line with the above comments.
As you say it yourself, there's a time and a place, which is undoubtedly what we hope to foster for those who are younger or at the start of learning any discipline, beyond programming, medicine, or engineering.
Nobody is saying that the death and loss is acceptable and normalised, but rather that in the real world we need a certain presence around the knowledge that they will occur, to a certain degree, regardless. So, we accept responsibility for what we can prevent, and strive to push the frontier of our capacity further with this in mind. For some, that comes from experience, unfortunately. For others, they can start to grapple with the notion in lieu of it through considering the consequences, and the scale of consequence; as the above comments would be evidence of, at least by implication.
These are not the only ways to develop a mindset of responsibility, fortunately, but that is what they can be, even if you find the literal wording to suggest otherwise. I cannot, of course, attest to the "true" feelings of others, but neither can anyone else... But in the spirit of the matter, consider: Your sense of responsibility, in turn, seems receptive to finding the areas by which such thinking can become justification for the very thing it would otherwise prevent, either as a shield purpose-built for the role or co-opted out of convenience. That too becomes integral, as we will always need to avoid complacency, and so must also promote this vigilance to become a healthy part of the whole for a responsible mindset -- lest we become that which we seek to prevent, and all that.
Exactly as you say, there's a greater problem, but this thinking is not necessarily justification for it, and can indeed become another tool to counter it. More responsibility, more mindfulness about our intents, actions, and consequences? That will prove indispensable for us to actually solve the greater problem, so we must appreciate that different paths will be needed to achieve it, after all, there are many different justifications for that problem which will all need to be robustly refuted and shown for what they are. Doing so won't solve the problem, but is rather one of many steps we will need to take.
Regardless, this mindfulness and vigilance about ourselves, as much as about each other, will be self-promoting through the mutual reinforcement of these qualities. If someone must attempt to visualise the staggering scale of consequence as part of developing this, then so be it. In turn, they will eventually grapple with this vigilance as well, as the responsibility behoves them to, else they may end up taking actions and having consequences that are equivalent to the exact mentality you fear, even if they do/did not actually "intend" to do so. The learning never ends, and the mistakes never will, so we must have awareness of the totality of this truth; even if only as best we can manage within our limited abilities.
> A recent Johns Hopkins study claims more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical errors. It is ok to be an imposter.
Is what I was originally replying to, which, at least to me does seem to imply preventative deaths are some kind of training tax during ones 'imposter stage'. Perhaps not the intention of the poster.
What in the medical malpractice?