Nor should a doctor “lift a fucking finger doing bedside work.” There are a lot fewer of them than nurses and they need to diagnose and manage multiple teams that are taking care of patients. No doctor has time to come and tuck you in and bring a glass of ice chips.
And it’s this comment right here that makes me say this. “No doctor has the time to come and tuck you in and bring you a glass of ice chips” well guess what? Nurses don’t either. CNAs are the ones who do that. Recently I had a doctor tell me he didn’t think nurses should be striking for better wages because “all they do is wipe asses and push gurney’s” these doctors give being a doctor a bad name. Don’t look down on the people actually carrying out the healthcare, because without them you have nothing.
Most nurses also don’t have the time. It’s usually nursing assistants bringing you ice chips. Nurses do a lot of what many people might imagine to be a doctor’s purview, or for which they might not realize the complexity and importance. E.g., it’s not a doctor carefully cleaning and dressing your wounds so that you don’t develop a systemic infection, nor is the doctor watching your vital signs or adjusting intravenous medication infusion rates while your organs balance on a knife’s edge, nor is it a doctor who pumps you full of epinephrine to restart your heart after you’ve slipped off the mortal coil. Doctors diagnose and order the treatment, but nurses carry it out, and that too requires specialized knowledge and skills which necessitate intensive education. Ask any nurse, and they’ll tell you that nursing school was one of the hardest experiences of their life.
But that’s all kind of irrelevant to the issue, which is loan eligibility for graduate-level education for nurses. That is, for roles like nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists, whose job functions and responsibilities significantly overlap with those of medical doctors. Much of the conversation in this thread, and the article itself, confuses that. Associate and bachelor level nursing degrees (the degrees held by most nurses, and the nurses doing the bedside care) weren’t eligible for the loans this rule impacts in the first place.
There’s only a shortage of doctors because the AMA restricts the number of medical colleges so that the number of doctors is artificially kept low so that they continue to make super high wages.
Actually, the problem is the number of residencies. Once you graduate from medical school, you MUST complete an accredited residency program to be able to practice independently. The number of residency programs is controlled by Congress because residencies are funded through Medicare, and the last substantial increase in the number of residencies was when they added 1000 more in the Covid Omnibus bill.
It’s actually a growing crisis because more medical schools are opening and existing ones are increasing their class sizes, but the number of residencies isn’t keeping pace. This means that more and more people are going to be medical graduates with no way of obtaining a medical license without a residency and therefore no way to pay off their student loans. There’s a couple stories every year about medical graduates that couldn’t get into residency or couldn’t complete residency that end up dying by suicide, but it gets pretty effectively swept under the rug.
Even progressive countries with excellent medical programs have a chronic shortage of doctors these days. So it’s not nearly that as much as you want to think.
Learning medicine is a long and hard road and there are so many fine details you need to be perfect at. And nothing less than perfection is expected from your teachers, peers, and patients. And even yourself.
Nor should a doctor “lift a fucking finger doing bedside work.” There are a lot fewer of them than nurses and they need to diagnose and manage multiple teams that are taking care of patients. No doctor has time to come and tuck you in and bring a glass of ice chips.
And it’s this comment right here that makes me say this. “No doctor has the time to come and tuck you in and bring you a glass of ice chips” well guess what? Nurses don’t either. CNAs are the ones who do that. Recently I had a doctor tell me he didn’t think nurses should be striking for better wages because “all they do is wipe asses and push gurney’s” these doctors give being a doctor a bad name. Don’t look down on the people actually carrying out the healthcare, because without them you have nothing.
Most nurses also don’t have the time. It’s usually nursing assistants bringing you ice chips. Nurses do a lot of what many people might imagine to be a doctor’s purview, or for which they might not realize the complexity and importance. E.g., it’s not a doctor carefully cleaning and dressing your wounds so that you don’t develop a systemic infection, nor is the doctor watching your vital signs or adjusting intravenous medication infusion rates while your organs balance on a knife’s edge, nor is it a doctor who pumps you full of epinephrine to restart your heart after you’ve slipped off the mortal coil. Doctors diagnose and order the treatment, but nurses carry it out, and that too requires specialized knowledge and skills which necessitate intensive education. Ask any nurse, and they’ll tell you that nursing school was one of the hardest experiences of their life.
But that’s all kind of irrelevant to the issue, which is loan eligibility for graduate-level education for nurses. That is, for roles like nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists, whose job functions and responsibilities significantly overlap with those of medical doctors. Much of the conversation in this thread, and the article itself, confuses that. Associate and bachelor level nursing degrees (the degrees held by most nurses, and the nurses doing the bedside care) weren’t eligible for the loans this rule impacts in the first place.
There’s only a shortage of doctors because the AMA restricts the number of medical colleges so that the number of doctors is artificially kept low so that they continue to make super high wages.
Actually, the problem is the number of residencies. Once you graduate from medical school, you MUST complete an accredited residency program to be able to practice independently. The number of residency programs is controlled by Congress because residencies are funded through Medicare, and the last substantial increase in the number of residencies was when they added 1000 more in the Covid Omnibus bill.
It’s actually a growing crisis because more medical schools are opening and existing ones are increasing their class sizes, but the number of residencies isn’t keeping pace. This means that more and more people are going to be medical graduates with no way of obtaining a medical license without a residency and therefore no way to pay off their student loans. There’s a couple stories every year about medical graduates that couldn’t get into residency or couldn’t complete residency that end up dying by suicide, but it gets pretty effectively swept under the rug.
Even progressive countries with excellent medical programs have a chronic shortage of doctors these days. So it’s not nearly that as much as you want to think.
Learning medicine is a long and hard road and there are so many fine details you need to be perfect at. And nothing less than perfection is expected from your teachers, peers, and patients. And even yourself.