Medical school is still rooted in the 1950s in a lot of ways, with an emphasis on memorization which is just patently ridiculous in an age of smartphones and search engines (not even factoring in the advent of LLMs). Residency involves working shifts that are best described as absolutely insane, in an environment that would be stressful enough as a five-hour shift, for little pay and even less prestige.

Doctors should absolutely be able to handle stress, and I can appreciate some amount of "hell week" ritual to make sure all graduates are battle-hardened, but all reports I've seen indicate that the current state of affairs has way too much fire in the trial-by-fire, and the trial itself dwindles on way past the point of any benefit.

It ends up producing doctors who are very, very good at doing a lot of busywork on deadline and getting yelled at, but aren't always the greatest at human intuition or thinking outside the flowchart, which is often to the detriment of patients.

So the physicians are typically faced with a thankless job. It is not their job to cure or heal diseases, but to treat them. And there have been multiple times I myself have confronted a problem with my PCP, and do you know what I hoped to hear? "Rest a while" or "here's a diet I suggest" or "avoid <xyz> if you can" -- just pragmatic advice in the form of "doctor's orders" because I am the type of guy who likes to be told what to do by authority figures, you know?

But physicians are not in that business either. And so people come into the office, obese, with developing chronic disorders that will never get any better; they are stuck in their ways and can't follow good advice anyway; they're ignorant and poor, and their main sources of food are 7-Eleven and Burger King.

So if a person goes into medicine with the goal of "helping people" then they can really become disillusioned by the process itself. There are no miracles worked except by showing compassion, exercising patience, and sharing wisdom.