Dr. Marty Makary: Why Medical Education Is Failing Doctors and Patients

We have to change medical school education. It is entirely broken. I will say, Gary, the young people that want to go into health care are beautiful people. They're doing it out of a sense of altruism, that there's something larger than ourselves, that contributing to the well being of others is greater than any self interest. But what we do is we take these bright, creative, altruistic young people and we beat them down for years and years. We give them this rote memorization and regurgitation curricula and they come out as robotic and they burn out. We burn them out. You fast forward and you go through this residency, medical school, memorized regurgitation thing. They're different people and then they come out reciting a catechism over and over again because it's a self preservation survival mode. So we have to change medical school education. It is entirely broken. It is focused on treating disease with a whack, a mole mindset and we've not allowed these bright, creative health professionals to go upstream and deal with the underlying root causes.