You’re editing even faster than I am.
Again, I think you are proving my point - it’s targeted education that has a chance of improving health outcomes, not proxy education. Pharmacology, psychology, communicating with at risk populations - that’s not the same thing as “3 credits in social sciences, 3 credits in language and literature etc. All of this should be part of medical education, but you need to prescribe it, not trust that a student who may not even be sure about med school at that point, somehow stumbles their way there. If you then squeeze all of the targeted education into 4 years of med school, those subjects probably fall by the wayside more often than not,
Sure, there's probably not a lot of daylight between our arguments. I do wonder what proportion of students self-select into those kinds of courses. If there's significant overlap and those general credits are being met with practical material, then that approximates a specialized credential.
I do maintain that the Canadian model is an excellent one in making those requirements explicit. (But maybe that's just national pride showing and junk, a priori conjecture.)
And yes, x1,000 that med school provides inadequate coverage of many important subjects that should properly be broken out as core classes. Here's a small example of that--in Canada, GPs receive 1 hour of instructional time on breastfeeding. This is a universal food and a vaccine, and yet it receives less instructional time than the rhythm method in family planning.
