Rant: Doctors don't change the world.

[m_the0ry]

There's a myth in America; if you're a bright student, the best way to positively impact the world is by becoming a clinician. It was all around me in high school and I even see it at the major public university I go to. Students that are very bright and hard workers - at least when they don't have a particular field of interest - trend towards clinical medical practice. The patient-doctor interface is best maintained by people with excellent social skills, and impacts lives in a highly erratic and low scale sense. The number of people a clinician can effectively see is dropping, and still experts estimate that 20% of all patients are misdiagnosed at some point.

Children should be brought up with the beliefs that if they work hard and exhibit intelligence they should aspire to enter the fields of medical research, law, or engineering. These are all scalable as far as impacting lives. A med research breakthrough can cure millions of disease. The courts hold government in place. Engineering is the gateway to technology. All of these fields are impacted on a large scale when a genious enters the stage. Geniouses are just flat out wasted on the doctor-patient relationship.