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Are technical professionals smarter than other professionals in other fields?

What are the tools that Doctors and other medical professionals use to stay at the cutting edge of their fields? What percentage of a doctor's time is devoted to such learning?

  • Do they attend conferences, read scientific papers, get notices from the FDA? Is there a big variance in how much different doctors learn after leaving medical school? Is there a universal set of guidelines for medicine that changes as more is learned, or does each doctor consider the evidence separately and perhaps come to different conclusions? Is it feasible for specialists to stay abreast of all the developments in their area of practice (and still get a reasonable amount of sleep every night/see enough patients to not go broke) and in close areas (how much does an endocrinologist know about the state of the art in cardiology, for example). I am curious about how treatments change with time, especially in comparison to science (where people often say that theories change only when all the holdouts die).

  • Answer:

    All of the above i.e conferences, read journals etc.. In most, if not all, hospitals there are continuing education requirements that need to be satisfied to stay on staff. Likewise to maintain board certification in your specialty you need continuing education requirements to apply for re-testing and re-certification. As part of continuing education most doctors attend weekly conferences at their hospital where specific cases are discussed (morbidity and mortality or M&M) and where presentations are made by local physicians or visiting lecturers or house staff i.e residents. Likewise, physicians attend conferences where they hear lectures as well as mingle with colleagues for interchange of ideas as well as socializing. If a new procedure is introduced then physicians will attend workshops or conferences relative to the new procedure. So there is a wide variety of continuing education, much of it required and much of it voluntary.

Robert Gluck at Quora Visit the source

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I too second Dr. Robert Gluck's answer. As for how long something you learned is valid, that depends, usually after some years the views have been fine tuned, sometimes we learn that we were wrong and need to take a different approach to the problem. When practising critical care medicine as an intensivist, a fast moving field, we used to tell each other that everything we learned at the last conference had an expiration date of about two years after! EDIT: As for time spend on continuing medical education: obligatory (otherwise no re-registration after 5 years!) of at least 200 hours of medical post grad schooling and congresses (due to coffee and lunch breaks etc. a day is only good for 6 hours) in 5 years;  I also used to read 4 medical magazines, 2 of which were weekly ones, and keeping tract of a lot of interesting articles from the two abstracting services I subscribed to free of charge, spending about 4 to 8 hours a week on reading.

Liang-Hai Sie

UpToDate® - http://www.uptodate.com/home Less know outside the medical world, UpToDate is the Doctors best friend now. Nothing flashy, Tons of text and does what the name says - stays uptodate.

Deepu Sebin

I second Dr 's answer. In addition there are a good number of continuing medical education sites that offer courses or learning modules.

Emily Altman

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