One thing that sticks with me from medical school onwards (both as student and faculty) is the partisan nature of specialties. Most of this is harmless fun: my organ (skin, liver, kidney etc) is bigger than your organ; the brain is more complicated than any other organ and therefore neurologists must be smarter than everybody else (although curiously this doesn’t seem to stretch to neurosurgeons — at least when neurologists are talking). Let’s call it organ imperialism. The humour of little boys judging their vitality by how high they can p*** up the wall. There are more vital things to get angry about.
There are however some darker sides to this professional ethnicity. Doctors indulging in advocacy for particular patient groups can often seem like doctors wishing their own unit or disease of interest receives more resources. A salient example in dermatology is the way that NHS resources for cancer (or children) frequently trump other demands. It is easier to lobby successfully for skin cancer1 than acne or hair loss in the absence of any meaningful attempt to weigh patient suffering (or just to assume it is self-evident)2. The contrast between paediatrics and geriatrics is often informative about underlying values.
One area that does worry me more is the encroachment of politics on medical education. I am thinking in particular on a priori claims about the superiority of certain models of care, or the attempts to subvert student choice of career in the name of what the ‘NHS needs’.
Undergraduate medical education should be both scholarly and intellectually neutral as to how health care is organised. We should of course introduce students to the various systems, and encourage them to criticise them. We should teach them to be analytical, and to understand the various reasons why people have chosen different systems (or how their views are manipulated). But we should be neutral in the sense that judgments need to be based on rational argument rather than slogans, and that students must be able to argue based on evidence.
I would say the same about career choice. Our primary duty in a university is to students. If a university were to demand that their graduates in computing were only to work for a British computing company and confine themselves to topics of ‘national importance’, or that its graduates in economics were only to work for the public rather than the public sector, they would no longer be taken seriously as an educational institution. And rightly so. Medicine should be no different.
- And note my clinical interests were focussed on skin cancer. ↩
- I am of course neatly sidestepping the existential difficulty of comparing oranges and apples here. Do not tell me that QUALYs are the answer: it is easy to construct a spreadsheet that tells you the area of skin involvement in a patient with psoriasis, but do not confuse this with the human judgment of whether somebody has bad psoriasis. ↩