One of the early jobs in my career was providing help desk tech support specifically to a group of nearby hospitals. Prior to that, I thought that - as you said - many or most medical professionals had an above average general intelligence by default. This job killed that theory.
The most prominent example I can recall is that of spending seventeen minutes on the phone trying to explain where to find a semicolon on the keyboard. Not what a semicolon is or how to use it or its function, just what it looked like and where it was on the keyboard. For seventeen minutes. At the end I think we gave up and found another approach. Obviously - again, as you said - their knowledge is specialized and I couldn’t do their job, but this and many other examples seemed pretty egregious.
That said, I’ve had a decent number of medical emergencies in my life and, while I’ve found a few doctors and nurses to be personally offensive, they’ve always seemed to do their job very competently and I’ve always, always appreciated them being there. Hopefully that demonstrates that the above example was an outlier.
There’s stupid people everywhere. The idea is that we can’t fool proof everything but we can promote change in attitude. There are no infallible people. I’ve met them all, engineers, doctors, politicians, millionaires, everyone has the potential for being utterly stupid at topics they aren’t even aware they are ignorant about.
Covid taught me that a nurse’s education is wholly inadequate. I also think they may be becoming irrelevant with so many specialized techs.
deleted by creator
One of the early jobs in my career was providing help desk tech support specifically to a group of nearby hospitals. Prior to that, I thought that - as you said - many or most medical professionals had an above average general intelligence by default. This job killed that theory.
The most prominent example I can recall is that of spending seventeen minutes on the phone trying to explain where to find a semicolon on the keyboard. Not what a semicolon is or how to use it or its function, just what it looked like and where it was on the keyboard. For seventeen minutes. At the end I think we gave up and found another approach. Obviously - again, as you said - their knowledge is specialized and I couldn’t do their job, but this and many other examples seemed pretty egregious.
That said, I’ve had a decent number of medical emergencies in my life and, while I’ve found a few doctors and nurses to be personally offensive, they’ve always seemed to do their job very competently and I’ve always, always appreciated them being there. Hopefully that demonstrates that the above example was an outlier.
There’s stupid people everywhere. The idea is that we can’t fool proof everything but we can promote change in attitude. There are no infallible people. I’ve met them all, engineers, doctors, politicians, millionaires, everyone has the potential for being utterly stupid at topics they aren’t even aware they are ignorant about.