Can A Person Be Considered A Doctor If They Acquired All The Necessary Knowledge Without Med School?

Can a person be considered a doctor if he/she has acquired all the necessary knowledge and experience on their own without a traditional medical school?

This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Jim Euclid, Veterinarian



Anyone can pretend to be a doctor.

Heck, some have even pretended for years and got away with it. Doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers. Frauds have occurred in every profession.

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• Man Who Allegedly Pretended To Be Doctor Worked In NSW Hospitals For Over A Decade
• Fake Doctor Worked At South Africa Hospitals For Five Years

Sore throat? Prescribe a 7-day course of antibiotics. How hard is that?

Yeah, being a doctor is easy if all you see is what they do and mimic their non-skilled talents. It's probably easier getting away with being a GP, who mostly deal with minor ailments and write prescriptions. It's easier than than say pretending to be a neurosurgeon or pediatrician.

My surgical nurse of 15 years said to me one day…

"Don't you get bored doing surgery? It's just snip snip. Nothing to it!"

After the surgery was done, I asked for my nurse to put the last skin stitch in.

She took 15 minutes and finally gave up.

Yeah, and watching someone play the piano looks easy too, until you try it.

Medical schools aren't there to make money. They don't have lecturers spending hours educating medical students just for the fun of it. It's not just about the knowledge. It's knowing what to know, and how to know and where to look and how to look. It's a doctor of 30 years telling a trainee surgeon what to do if this happens, what to do if that happens. This wisdom is very fluid and personalised and not written in a textbook because it very conditional knowledge.

It's not something a book or YouTube can teach you. If you think you know more than a university trained doctor from teaching yourself at home, you're not only naive but dangerous.

Sure, I was performing surgeries long before I graduated vet school, but there's a difference when there's skin in the game. When you can be sued, deregistered, assaulted or even killed for getting things wrong*. Every doctor knows the price of having their neck on the line.

I find it hard to believe that you could remove a tumor like this one I did yesterday, just by watching it on YouTube or practising it on a cadaver. I didn't break a sweat removing this baby, but I know that 30 years ago as a new graduate I would have come undone. The owners are waiting for your phone call post op. It's a geriatric patient. The owner's daughter will be devastated if the patient dies.

And this isn't even a human patient!



It takes many great teachers to make a great student.

So, to answer your question…

No, not even a first year undergraduate medical student would you make.


Also Read:

• Fake Doctor Arrested in Kenya After Performing 8 Successful Surgeries
• A Fake Doctor in India Is Believed to Have Infected More Than 21 People With HIV

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