Online Medical Classes

Do you have to know all this stuff?

I have been looking at online medical dictionaries. There are so many diseases and conditions. Do you learn ALL of these things when you are in medical school? Do you have to know all of these things to be a doctor??

Public Comments

1. You might have to know it all when you take a test in med school on it but a lot of in it in real world depends on what kind of doctor you are. Also that's why new doctors do residencies so they can see these conditions in real life. That's also why there are so many doctors. A lot of them specialize in certain disorders or fields.
2. I know it seems daunting, but it really isn't as bad as you might think. First of all, it is science, and science has to make sense. Yes, there is a lot of material to learn, but it is broken down into manageable units. The hardest thing is not can you graduate from medical school; the hardest thing is can you get accepted to get into medical school. So the stuff you really need to learn and do well in is pre-med.
3. Pretty well. There are a lot of eponymns that just don't come up much, but for the most part, those funny-sounding names actually make sense. Nonetheless, medical school is all about cramming tons of information into a few years' school, much more intensely than undergraduate school. It's also one of the reasons you have to be pretty smart before they'll take you into medical school.
4. You have to learn A LOT in medical school, but it is not humanly possible to learn everything about everything. Medical school teaches you about a lot of diseases, but it also gives you a foundation of physiology and pathology, so that you can understand disease processes. That way, if you have to look something up, you can understand it. Also, new diseases and new understanding of old diseases are always coming up, so you have to be able to assimilate new information. Medical school is a lot of memorization, though. A LOT. I've forgotten a lot of what I learned because I don't use it. However, if I have a patient with, say, Apert's syndrome, I can go look it up and see how it might affect what I am going to do with him in the OR.
5. That is why you spend 4 years in medical school after learning biology and chemistry for 4 years in college.
6. Haha. I am thinking EXACTLY the same thing. I am a vet student, we have to know even MORE diseases and conditions, and how to treat them in all species of animals. It is REALLY hard. Have you got the Merck Manual? I have the veterinary copy of it (its twice the thickness of the medical copy..lol). http://www.merck.com/mmpe/index.html Its really good. Buy a copy if you can, amazon has it for £20 or so ($40 ish). Anyway, good luck!