Rich Without Money

In contrast to my Goldman post I found this article very refreshing.

"...At the age of 36, Bob gave up his career as a quality control technician, went to medical school and set out to improve the quality of the planet. He opened his office in a neighborhood where most doctors wouldn't open their car door [poorest part of Albany, NY], and welcomed in all the people mainstream medicine would rather ignore..."

My first reaction is that we need more of these people in medicine. I worry, however, that the selection process weeds them out. It's hard to ace your classes, complain to your Professors when you don't, research, engage in other leadership and extracurricular activities, etc. when you're busy going around doing unrenumerated acts of kindness. Unfortunately there is no correlation between empathy and "objective" test scores (when they say objective, do they mean this person will "objectively" be a better doctor?), at least for the standardized scores currently weighted heavily in admissions. While I think the new MCAT Communications Skills project is a start, I propose a radically new admissions criteria. Somehow someway students need to be faced with a situation in which they must decide between helping someone in need and succeeding career wise. Maybe they could delay a premed student such that he/she was running late for an important premed exam, and then strategically place a seriously injured person in the path of that student as he/she was rushing to the exam. Pick those students who stop to help. Easy.
My second reaction was to stick my chest out ever so slightly with pride for being Canadian. Maybe I'll buy myself a Canadian flag doo rag and next time I hear the Canadian anthem put my hand on my chest. It would take over 100,000 Dr. Paeglows to serve those people in the US without medical insurance. If Dr. Paeglow lived in Canada, he could do what he was doing, get paid for it (he could just give the money to the patients if he is so inclined), and get the same kind of resources for his patients that everyone (theoretically) enjoys. I make such an observation not to criticize the US system but to glorify ours. In fact, I'm not a US basher at all. I try to avoid criticizing the US because I'm sensitive to the new found Canadian sensitment of moral superiority over our friends of the south. We'll save that topic for another post. The bar chart is from the Yes! Magazine article: Has Canada Got the Cure?