[Miraste]

It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing everything anyway).

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation

Which is a load of dingos kidneys.

Gate keeping.

All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it, even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible.

And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes.

The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical intervention, so it could be argued doctors should be using more reference material and not relying on their over worked brains.

[skylanh]

Anecdotes in support of this comment:

I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.

He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.

His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:

- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake

- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery

- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation

- (surgery)

- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went

So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.

As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.

I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.

[why_Mr_Anderson]

But parent post is arguing that to become a doctor you need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is absolutely true. And about that wall of reference material .. yeah, it's usually there to impress patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm from family with too many MDs)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

It might be true, but I'm arguing it isn't necessarily the best.

We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.