Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
My recollection of medical school was that almost all of the stellar students and smartest students were the same people. You did have a pot of smart bad students but usually they had something like ADHD and couldn't keep up with the study demand. Although I find that the smart people who didn't do well were better at retaining information years later than the not as smart but better students (this retention being in reference to things like other people's specialties).
However, "bad student" for medical school in the U.S. is a god outside of it - things like pre-exam crams and all nighters are flat out impossible. It isn't uncommon at the start of first year to be basically learning multiple undergrad classes worth of material in a week, every week. Almost all exams are incredibly high stakes and some are full days in length or more etc.
The material usually doesn't require much beyond an above average IQ to learn but the amount of it is vicious - the classic statement is "like drinking from a firehose" and then you do that for years.
No amount of pure horsepower can do it - you also need the effort.
That said an interesting part of how this has gone in the US is that the rote memorization component of medical education has become more or less solved, and since they need to do some candidate discrimination..... they've worked very hard to dial in on the "thinking" parts instead of pure memorization.
A question might be - patient with x disease has y side effect, which of the following medications most likely caused the side effect? And then all 6 meds cause that side effect - they want you to know that one of the medications is overwhelmingly likely to be prescribed because of a practice guideline, causes the side effect at a much higher rate, or something else like that.
15-20 years ago the standardized tests were hard because the way medical knowledge has exploded in recent years. Now they are actually fucking hard and require much more in depth understanding.
This may be a bit US specific though, as the population of students here is generally neurotic passionate about care people or money seekers looking for the best gig (which also requires high performance).
EDIT: An added layer of problem is that the exams have no constrained syllabus, the best you have is weights. The contents is usually "everything." Nephrology in Ortho boards? Sure. A modality that hasn't been used outside of Eastern Europe for 30 years? Sure. A drug that just cleared clinical trials five minutes ago? Yeah.
The secret is that all of the questions are fair or at least important (ex: new drug is actually the first in a new class of medications that they've been trying to get off the ground for decades), but as a student you don't know that until years later, so if you want to do well (and people do) you have to know absolutely EVERYTHING.
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