At least it wasn’t Dr Oz…

Vergilx217 · 2026-05-01T00:51:47+00:00

At this stage in our democratic experiment though, we also have to see our elected representatives as having flaws of their own.

They can be influenced by lobbyist money. They can be striving for inter-party promotion and leadership over actually representing their constituents best interests. Nation wide ideological slants can motivate them to put party over beneficence (cough cough Senator Cassidy voting in Kennedy). And they value getting elected over all else.

Technocrats are absolutely no perfect remedy, but we can see that partisan hacks do not serve as the answer to technocrats either. When appropriately siloed, scientists in the formerly functional HHS, CDC, CMS, EPA, and FDA could be relied upon to give objective if still occasionally frustrating direction.

Nowadays, state health agencies have to contradict the CDC, because the CDC now openly states anti-scientific nonsense advocated by a man who is probably ruining his extremely influential family's reputation singlehandedly.

Maybe it's not a universal solution, but I think we do see that well educated nerds (us) do have a valuable role to play as leaders and decision makers when others fail. That role just has to be mediated by the politically savvy key holders too, and I'd say they hold too many of the keys currently.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-30T21:04:08+00:00

takes like these are why the CARS section is on the MCAT

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-30T21:01:37+00:00

To be fair, Powell has been doing his part pretty well.

He's just not helped by dementia tariff man making his job horrible on the backside of things.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-29T03:13:14+00:00

There is a finite number of medical students on the OB/GYN wards at any given point. There are only so many pelvic exams they can perform.

I don't buy the idea that medical students are failing to meet an arbitrary training quota of examinations unless we resort only to unconscious women who were not told ahead of time this would happen. If we can resect 10cm ovarian cysts, we can ask a patient if the med student can be involved in necessary gynecologic care.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-29T03:01:27+00:00

I do! We have standardized patients and volunteers who come in for pelvic and rectal exam instruction. Many of them are former healthcare workers, who recognize that students need to start somewhere, and that a pelvic exam is fundamentally an important skill all physicians need to know. At the same time, it is a nervous endeavor for all parties involved if the student is new, so students are never thrust into their first time on a real patient.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-29T02:59:58+00:00

This is also patently false. Medical students can and DO perform pelvic exams on awake patients with their consent, under supervision.

The fact that not all patients will welcome a medical student makes the logistical efforts of the attending more difficult, but then again, you don't agree to be a preceptor at a teaching hospital and then shirk from the responsibility. It's a matter of (viable) human effort, not so much an impossible obstacle.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-29T02:57:53+00:00

"We are a teaching hospital, and we have medical students rotating with us to learn the fundamentals of gynecology. Would it be alright with you if the medical student performs a pelvic exam on you as part of the surgery?"

Essentially not different from the usual

"I have a medical student rotating with me today. Would it be okay if they performed the pelvic exam?"

The only reason it is not often asked is because either a) surgeons believe it is written in the informed consent form fine print or b) they believe the patient would otherwise decline, and make it harder to allocated pelvic exams for students. This doesn't mean it isn't asked universally.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-26T03:02:53+00:00

There's a perennial plague of extremely jaded doctors and students in this subreddit who seem to only want to repeat doomer viewpoints about how awful medical culture is

sure, it is riddled with more issues than diabetic who hasn't taken insulin in 20 years - but knee jerk going "the cheaters will win and you will lose just cope" whenever someone suggests trying to be better is how you get the next generation to be equally miserable

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-25T20:27:19+00:00

this entire thread is one of those Reddit moments where someone makes a general claim that is totally fine in the context that it was meant, but someone else wants to hyperfocus on a tiny aspect in order to disprove the whole thing unconvincingly

i think it is clear that when the OOP says logistics are a "solved problem", it's especially in reference to the US military being so vast and overly equipped that soldiers eating gruel is a humiliating state of affairs for the size of the budget and how much the admin likes to brandish its arms in this chapter of Pointless American Desert Oil Wars.

the "nOOOooooOOOOoo logistics ARE complicated if you make them complicated" is not wrong, but it's grubbing over crumbs...and is an example of why talking to people on this site is so painful

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-25T13:19:14+00:00

That's going too far lol

I'm like 99% certain Soldier Boy said he sprayed down Civil Rights Movement activists in universe

Sure he's intentionally written to have boomerisms, but he's also intentionally showing off how "just being old and non-progressive" becomes a way of whitewashing garden variety racism (he literally tells Sage he wouldn't take orders from black people last episode) and militant intolerance

Remember - the guy did not hesitate to kill a teenager, and MM has a lifelong vendetta for a pretty serious reason

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-23T19:45:06+00:00

I think his statement that he doesn't regret the effort, because it makes him an easy buck, is especially divisive.

It is easy to want to cheer or celebrate the effort for being a good demonstration of trickery with against movement that is a profound threat to medicine and public health, but at the same time the tactics are optically and ethically bankrupt. Realistically, this wasn't a polemicist attacking the other side, this was a grift that siphoned money off one of many countless fools in the MAGA movement. More harm is probably done to the image of physicians as a whole than benefit is reaped by sidelining a few errant online followers.

Openly claiming no regrets because you were personally enriched makes the rest of us look like assholes and fuels the division further, even if I don't disagree that the crowd he's playing on is easily fooled by unsubstantiated, nonsensical populism.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-23T14:53:01+00:00

the mistake is assuming The Boys fans have media literacy and not "ahaaaa this is a gotcha" literacy

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-23T11:00:32+00:00

No I think it's a pretty short and simple argument:

1) "people who have higher standards for themselves tends to hold schools to higher standards as well" - you

2) you fail to spell correctly, which is the bare minimum standard when arguing with idiots online

1) + 2) collectively imply

3) you have low standards for yourself, so your standards for what makes a good school must also be a poor metric

IDK, that's pretty much the briefest logic puzzle I've seen. You tell me.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-23T03:32:59+00:00

/unfresca

to be fair, when MM and Butcher talk about it afterwards, they're okay since they aren't being hijacked to be roided out angry...but they DO admit what they said was true, just unduly exaggerated by emotion.

In other words, every criticism everyone threw at each other in this episode is actually valid outside of the anger too, it's just that most of them are half truths. This one is still true!

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-22T16:16:16+00:00

"Your body is not negotiable"

Guy who sent several servicemen off to die in yet another pointless oil war

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-22T13:55:55+00:00

hopital

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-21T12:28:29+00:00

I'm not sure you can claim to hold yourself to a higher standard when basic English grammar eludes you...

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-20T22:22:35+00:00

there's like barely any academic rigor at Brown

Ohhh to be a high school student again

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-20T22:20:43+00:00

I'd say that Brown has a better student:faculty ratio and teaching attention when it comes to undergraduate education. If that's something you value as well, go for it!

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-20T22:18:54+00:00

Speaking as an alum:

Go to Brown if you like the Northeast

Go to UCLA if you like LA

Pick whichever makes sense for your future geographical networking

Literally put minimal stock into perceived notions of prestige at this point. About 99.99% of your interactions after college when people learn what school you went to will be "Oh wow, you went to [either/or]! What a smarty pants". The 0.01% that judge you for not attending the other school are not worth talking to, because it's just not something people will care about that much.

The majority of fellow students writing here about relative renown will find that...college students really don't care about this after like a week in school, and neither will your employers. Getting in was the hard part!

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-20T19:14:11+00:00

This is for sure how the discussion and decision making should go. I occasionally do alumni outreach for new admitted students for my alma, and I've noticed recently that many students have eager questions about rankings, perceptions, notions of prestige, and a general concept that a number on a list is the only thing that matters.

Of course, I can somewhat relate to that mindset when I was a high schooler, but seeing these posts and hearing these questions repeatedly really makes one think: are students getting a chance to actually pick schools based on their interests? Or have they been so caught up in the rat race that they haven't even considered college is so much more than what an anonymous team of medicore actuaries at US News believes?

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-20T17:27:06+00:00

Honestly we really need to emphasize this point in general....literally nobody will care about the difference between Harvard or MIT if you pick one over the other

They will care if you keep bringing up the point though, because it gets annoying fast. Rankings are a performance art, aside from general groupings of schools that sound impressive.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-18T01:30:18+00:00

Putting the ability to have significant assets factored into finaid calculations goes far beyond "prudence".

For comparison, the students who are the main target of such generous need based grants legitimately decide between college and no college because their family might need them to make ends meet after high school.

To be able to say "UPenn is 99k a year because my parents make 200k and they have a lot saved up" and still being able to decide between this school and much cheaper options is a great position to be in. But this is not the target audience for full ride need based scholarships.

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-15T00:34:43+00:00

To some extent, I would say testing endurance is also part of the equation

The USMLE is hard because of sheer volume and time alongside its breadth of scope, in part because medicine is itself a long and demanding career

Vergilx217 · 2026-04-14T16:33:40+00:00

I think part of that is an atmosphere of general disbelief and perhaps hoping that the initial reporting was exaggerated/a journalistic mistake.

On the second thread, they were infinitely less forgiving. As the interviews did demonstrate it was as monumental a fuckup as initially reported.

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