Why Do So Many Of The Smartest Intellectual People In The World Want To Be Medical Doctors?

This question was originally posted on Quora.

Answer by Kevin Manz, M.D., Ph.D. Candidate • Vanderbilt University

Doctors who are smart are not necessarily intellectual.

I think most people admitted to medical school are intelligent enough to pass requisite coursework, rotations and board exams. The greatest realization I have made in medical school thus far is that doing well in school is not the same thing as being intellectual.

An uncomfortable majority ofstudents in medical school are motivated, cookie-cutter, straight-A automatons that lack the directed curiosity of scientists. There are several reasons why this exists – many of which are related to the way in which students are funneled through the healthcare system.

Entering medical school requires good grades. The inflated emphasis on this requirement forces students to study what is required to do well on exams. While doing well in school obviously underlines qualities a doctor should have, it encourages a form of checkmark thinking that prevents students from delving deeply into their interests.

Students are ultimately manufactured into lazy, mechanical thinkers during medical school and residency. They are forced to associate signs and symptoms with a disease without understanding why these relationships exist in the first place. Many respond to this criticism with hand wringing and dismissal, stating that memorizing detailed physiology offers minimal benefit in clinical practice.

My response is – seriously?

This is not to say that clinical medicine is intellectually barren. A tremendous number of practitioners use their practice to probe medical enigma. Many of them are my mentors. However, it has always bothered me that society reveres physicians as the intelligent, successful tradesman of medicine, when scientists inspire much of what is used in clinical practice. This association is strengthened by the difference in salary between the two fields.

This is my perspective as a MD student transitioning into PhD land next year, so take my comments with a shovel of salt.



Answer 2 by Sam Sinai, Med School Dropout

Not true at all in my opinion. The 'smartest' people are usually very creative, hardly conform, and break existing frameworks.

In modern medicine, you rarely get to do these things as a doctor treating patients. The creativity happens in the research lab, which hands you an FDA approved protocol that you follow (or get sued). Being creative is good as a doctor, but more often than not you have to think twice before doing something out of the box. Your mistake may cost someone's life after all.

In fact, a common issue in the US is that doctors perform unnecessary tests in order to defend themselves against being sued. That shows how constrained and worried they are about making mistakes.

In science and engineering, there is no such limit. You can be creative as much as you want. So very smart people generally either go to industry or do science and engineering PhDs. MD/PhDs or researching MDs are more in this category, not in the 'actively seeing patients' category. But in those cases it is not the MD training that you really use to do research, you just use it to get access to patients that way.

This is not to say that smart people don't study medicine, they do, but medicine's appeal is generally not related to solving tough problems which is the main attraction for very smart people. Good doctors are generally those who are most enthusiastic about helping people, and hence they get good at their job.


Answer 3 by Edmond de Youngblood, Keynote speaker and Bestselling author

Statistically the smartest people IQ wise are almost never Doctors. Of the top 5000 highest IQs actually none are physicians. In fact most people with genius level IQs show a history of being under employed. Of the 10 highest IQs on the planet, none of them were wealthy. And 80% of the people who earn more than 50 million per year do not have college degrees. That includes Bill Gates (dropped out of Harvard) and is only one of 700 billionaires with an IQ over 150.



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