Chill out, it’s not that I can’t appreciate anything you say, I’m just an argumentative bastard, this is the Internet, and this is really a much faster and easier way to get to business than playing patty-cake about how grateful the world should be that we all decide get up every morning before broaching the subject. If you think this is cause to leave in disgust, I’ve given and received orders of magnitude more bile than this in arguments over video games. Get out more, or maybe less.

“I could open a book on mechanics, buy a few tools, and fix my car in my own driveway. If I screw it up, so what? No big deal, no one dies, I’ll read through everything again and I’ll probably figure it out. And the best part is, no matter what is wrong with the car I’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out.”

First, you sound suspiciously like the internet self-diagnosers here talking about how easy someone else’s profession is. Secondly, if you think there’s no stakes, consider what happens if your ham-handed repair job with all the fancy books and stuff decides to come apart at 70 mph on a crowded freeway because you forgot one of those basic steps the books assume you knew about. Sorta like one of those otherwise intelligent self-diagnosers armed with the best Google has to offer with no concept of renal function. I have no doubt you could pull off the trained monkey work of oil changes, but plenty of professions out there also have lives riding on their competence, including mechanics. Rationally, the terrible, horrible responsibility of all these lives in our hands just doesn’t carry all that much weight in the argument to me. Some minimum wage flunky working at a peanut butter plant recently killed and sickened more folks than most of us will in an entire career or at least a sizable portion of one, I’ll be waiting for the new 7-12 year training program to properly prepare folks for the onus of that weighty responsibility.

“Medicine is slightly different. People who go online to try to self-diagnose, even the most educated ones, are often way out in left field. There’s a reason why it takes so many years to get through the process. What about the old lady who comes into my ER with altered mental status? She’s on about 20 medications. Did she take too many of one of them? Is this sepsis? Stroke? Electrolyte imbalance? Laundry list of potential diagnoses and it’s up to me to sort through that. Not every encounter takes this level of reasoning but some do and those are the ones that keep me interested.”

It takes so long to become a doctor in no small part because it takes so long to be a doctor. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because there’s really no other way to get there than what we have, so it’s not like you can exactly make much of a valid comparison. I guess midlevels, but then again they’ve been pretty successful at making large strides into our market.

Once upon a time, people figured you had to be a eunuch to be a good at certain jobs, go figure. Eventually all the suitable jobs were filled by eunuchs, so you did need to be a eunuch to hold them. I’m sure if someone had the idea all prospective doctors had to literally rather than figuratively surrender their gonads to get into med school, people would, and there’s no doubt we’d have some awesome gonadless doctors out there. As to whether that proves you need to be gonadless doctors, well, give the system 150 years and no one will know the difference anymore. Oh wait, sounds familiar. That’s right sonny, we’re only doing all this because it’s the only way we can make you a good doctor, just like it’s always been.