Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Med School

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

The Hippocratic Oath says do no harm. Explain elitism, secret societies, and debilitating physical and mental exhaustion to the point of potentially harming both doctor and patient, then?? Such is the "cult" of med school, this week's in-demand topic, which Amanda and Isa are discussing with insights from listeners who've survived this seemingly prestigious, but sneakily damaging (allegedly!!!) everyday "cult." To support Sounds Like A Cult on Patreon, keep up with our live show dates, see Isa's live comedy, buy a copy of Amanda's book Cultish, or visit our website, click here! Click HERE To get YOUR tickets to Sounds Like A Cult Live in London on May 26th! Thank you to our sponsors! Get $10 off your first month of Nutrafol by visiting nutrafol.com and entering promo code CULT  Visit article.com/CULT for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more Go to DAILYHARVEST.com/cult to get up to $65 dollars off your first box!  Visit BetterHelp.com/CULT today to get 10% off your first month.    

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of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable facts. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This is Jen from Toronto and I think the cultiest thing about med school is that you're sold this lie that becoming a doctor is such an honor and you should be grateful that you've even gotten in when in reality you're sleep deprived working for up to 28 hours straight. You have no control of your life. Medicine has become your entire identity and you're working for free but you're being told that exhaustion of free labor is a testament to your dedication to the field and even if you wanted to leave the exit costs are so high you can't because you've accrued a quarter of a million

dollars in debt and you spent your entire life trying to get in so you have no discernible skills outside of medicine. Hi, Issa and Amanda. As a medical student from the northeast part of the country the cultiest part of medical school is the match process. Essentially you can go to school for many many years to become a physician and an algorithm gets to decide if and where and with whom you get to start your career. This is Miriam from Ireland. I would say that the cultiest thing about med school is how competitive it is. You're made to believe that your class ranking is the be all and end all and you are actively discouraged from helping out your classmates. You're also encouraged to pursue particular specialties because they are competitive rather

than because they have any inherent value as a career option for you as an individual. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Issa Medina and I'm a comedian touring all over the country and LA. I'm Amanda Montel, author of the book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism. Every week on our show we discuss a different zeitgeisty group that puts the cult in culture from corporate America to celebrity mega churches to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult but is it really? Is it? I mean the cult we're talking about this week is definitely one that has saved lives but also ruined them, potentially put them at risk. Yes. Well we want to keep this episode

short and sweet because we know doctors don't have a lot of time so yeah we're keeping it snappy today. We are for you. Go save lives. You got that 12 hour surgery to do. Let's go. And listen to us the experts before you get in there. Wash your hands all the way to your elbows like they do in the movies. You know the Hippocratic oath it says do no harm but explain then the cult of med school and its inherent elitism, its unquestioned power structures, its debilitating physical and mental exhaustion to the point of potentially harming both doctor and patient sounds more like a cult to me. Wow you're passionate about this. Who did you wrong? Who did you dirty? I don't know it's just I remember when my cousin was trafficking through the cult of

med school and he once told me that the level of sleep deprivation he was enduring made him feel drunk every single day and I'm like I don't want someone who's so tired to the point of feeling inebriated to be even checking my heart rate much less operating on me. Dude I think about that all the time because we all have a friend from undergrad college who was like a frat boy and drank so much alcohol and now they're like an oncologist and I'm like what the fuck are you talking about dude like you were just shotgunning beers five minutes ago. It is frightful if not a frat bro who was borderline a problem drinker to alcoholic that at least someone who you had suspicions was not smarter or more capable than you and is now like a pediatric cardiologist and

I'm like I'm scared. Yeah truly I'm like um oh yeah I think I would like to go on webmd actually no I just kidding I don't go on that website anymore because then I think I have Ebola. But this week we are talking about med school it's a very in-demand topic we've gotten from plenty of people so be sure to send it to your friend in med school your friend who's thinking of med school maybe pre-med vibes because we all know the cult starts early and if you don't invest up top with pre-med you have to do a post back so there really are so many layers to this little cult. Ah listen to the terminology already I mean I was never under the impression that medicine would be the right career path for me but we did receive many many insights from our listeners who

requested this topic repeatedly it's one of many schools that we intend to cover on this show because education is famously cult-y whether you're in catholic school or a Montessori school or med school there's something about education that is just endlessly controlling and power abusive and overly optimistic in the way that cults can often be. I also think it is fun to look at it from the perspective of like med school is a subculture of the cult of grad school in general which we have talked about on this podcast before and here's the thing whether they are like heaven's gate level fringy and dangerous or not cults are known to be super elite and hyper structured almost like a private kindergarten for grown-ups and grad school can be so culty

because you are as an adult joining a group of people who then all just become friends and become really close and tighten it simply because they share an environment and they share a schedule and a lot of times people marry each other in med school or meet and marry each other in grad school but uh I'm not married so I wouldn't know but med school actually does remind me of the cult of academia in that sense because you just accept from very early on that you very well might have to move to some state to do your residency that you absolutely have no desire to live in because that's where the opportunity lies you could practically end up on a cult compound in Iowa or who knows where because that's where the industry begs of you but I will say that it

is different from the cult of academia in that there is this obvious demand for doctors in a way that there is not say an obvious demand for people with PhDs in classics that's true but having to move somewhere random for your residency that again goes back for me to a very important aspect of the cult is the marrying into it and the being a part of it by proxy is that like if you date someone who's in med school they literally have to move with you to the bumfuck middle of nowhere and you don't just get to go where you want it's because of like a supply and demand situation oh absolutely it reminds me of the expectations that are set by people who truly subscribe to the cult of the american dream you're either supposed to become a lawyer an executive or a

doctor and so even though there is this very very legitimate demand for medical care we all have bodies we all get sick there is also something kind of delusionally optimistic and power abusive about this field and to your point before it's also like the military it is so militaristic and exclusive and demands you to make so many sacrifices and we're just gonna get into how the cult of med school while seemingly prestigious can be actually kind of destructively culty in the society these days and really quickly I think before we get into the background of med school I think it's important to touch on that what you said like the american dream of it all and how everyone always wanted to be a doctor everyone always wanted to be a lawyer because historically

those jobs have paid really well so even though you invest a lot of money up front in the schooling you do end up making it back but as we talked in our episode of the cult of wall street or other episodes because this is a common theme with the hashtag economy things are getting squeezed hashtag wall street term but most importantly there is hella inflation right now so a six figure income which is what a doctor or a lawyer was going to make like in the early 2000s that was going to help them raise their whole family by a house now that might not be what helps you retire at 65 oh certainly you're not getting the same return not to mention this is also connected to the cult of corporate culture and so many of these american dream connected cults that we've done

in the past in the pharmacy and the pharmacy pseudocals and health insurance which in america as we know is not free this is just like a grab bag of culty words we like put them in one of those bags that contain scrabble tiles and you just reach in and pull out seven you're like i'm somehow going to spell something i also think in med school you are sort of inherently built up to have this god complex right because you are literally saving lives but now school is so fucking grueling that it can kind of ruin your soul oh yeah because you're not only learning about anatomy and illnesses and treatments and doctors get so much wrong for so many years but you're also learning how to confront like the human aspect of your patients and that's

so cult leader training like in a moment where you have to tell your patient that they might not live after a year you have to keep it together and you can't have a human reaction to navigating death in your hands i mean that's so much power and pride i know having literally life and death in your hands it's wild and also having been kind of desensitized and trained to have so much pride while at the same time being so burnt out and sleep deprived and isolated in your little cult of fellow doctors and training that has the potential in my opinion to get pretty dangerous hello culties we are interrupting our regularly scheduled programming for a very special announcement to our london lesardes so don't check out we are going to be doing a live show

friday may 26 at 7 p.m literal london time babes i mean listen to how much fun we had at our last live show stay culty are you sure you want to miss that no you don't we have a really fun show and topic prepared for you that will be released only for our live show audience not our general audience so you will have to come in person you know we like to keep our live show topic limited exclusive to just the live show so you can come and hang out with us and watch us do our thing in person knowing that absolutely no one outside of this cult will know the super secret things we're going to discuss this will be fully live with us in person and unedited so see how the cake gets made you mean how the sausage is made oh very english of you to make this about sausage

yes how the cookie crumbles get tickets to our live london show on may 26 at 7 p.m at the link in our bio on instagram or it sounds like a cult.com they're going fast so come and join us in person before it's too late hi my name is laura i'm from belgium and i work as a gp one of the most cultiest things about med school for me is a fact that it's supposed to be a calling some kind of religious higher purpose and because of that apparently as a med student you don't need to take a rake or get paid or anything like that i mean i love helping people but i'd also like to pay my rent and stuff hi my name is thomas i'm a medical doctor and i'm calling from new olens i believe that medical school is a cult because of the great lens that most medical institutions

will go through in order to protect abusers you can be a racist or a misogynist you name it but if you brought research to the institution if you have certain accolades it doesn't matter that other students paying over 70 grand a year for tuition they will protect their views are at all so really quickly for a little background because i don't know maybe seven year olds are listening to our podcast but med school is four years long and this is actually a very american thing because in a lot of other countries you go into med school straight from undergrad but i think we want to talk particularly about american med school because it is a lot cultier than other countries you have to choose to be pre-med right when you get into undergrad so you commit to that for four

years and then you have another four years of medical school after college and then after that you can be in a residency from anywhere between three to seven years which is a long time and i do understand the time commitment it's culty in a sense because you're surrounded by such a homogeneous group of people selectively studying this one thing but at the same time we with very much hope that our doctors were specialists and well educated so i do understand the necessity of it but at the same time there are cultish and totally unquestion aspects of that lengthy medical school experience that make it super culty yes a lot of things aren't questioned like going pre-med right in undergrad to medical school but something that i learned recently is that if you

don't do pre-med you can just do a post back what is a post back a post back is when you did not do pre-med in undergrad you graduate from undergrad you reapply to a college or university to just do one to two years of pre-med essentially so that you have all of the prerequisites to get into med school and you didn't have to do pre-med in undergrad i actually think that's a really good option because it's pretty simple to graduate in three years from undergrad if you do like a normal degree like history or politics or linguistics or linguistics and so my recommendation to anyone out there thinking about med school it's like do an easy undergrad that you enjoy that you love get fucking a 4.0 and then do a one-year post back after you graduate in three years that simple

honestly i actually think that is quite sensible i had no idea that that was even an option i thought you have to set your fate from the age of 18 it is an option that a lot of people don't talk about and it's one of those situations where it is an option like rooted in privilege because it does cost a lot of money to do a post back right but it's that thing where like if you didn't get the grades you wanted in undergrad because you were busy partying and socializing then you have that one year to like really focus and buckle down and some of them have the partnership where it's like if you get into the post back and get a certain gpa you automatically get into the med school it is frightful because there are such life and death consequences here it's like do i want my

doctor to just partied and gotten a linguistics degree and then done a post back i don't know and i don't know that i want to know that's true at least they got it out of their system you definitely don't want a doctor who's an active alcoholic so so very true some of the most prestigious medical schools according to us news include harvard john hopkins ucsf university of toronto shout out to our producer hashtag canada stanford university of washington u penn and oxford it's not a long list so uh it's probably pretty hard to get into those situations oh exclusivity is a huge part of this quote unquote cult also shout out to my parents who are professors at john's hopkins medical school it is important to put the s on the end of john's why i don't know because there are

two of them oh it's a theory theory yeah that is a fun historical fact about mr johns and mr hopkins but uh let's get into the history of medical school cultiness health and healing have long been at the heart of religion been before hypocrites the so-called father of medicine greek physician who lived from about 460 bc to 375 bc most afflictions and their cures were attributed to the wrath or favors of god which is kind of insane yeah it's funny that you mentioned that because i am in italy right now i'm traveling in italy and i recently took a tour of the oldest university in europe which is the university of balonia it was erected in 1088 and it has this really old medical school with this old operating theater that's so spooky i

fucking love like old medical equipment anatomy equipment it's so creepy in this operating theater say three five hundred years ago before the invention of the scientific method these medical students used to take the cadavers of recently executed heretics who'd like just been hanged in the town square they would take them donate their bodies to science slap them on this operating table and a group of of course all white male medical students in these robes with the professor at the front like a cult leader they would just dig around in the bodies of these people to just see what was up and that's wild because that actually still happens today i mean people donate their body i'm an organ donor like i don't know what they're gonna do with it you know like in modern

day hospitals they have those kinds of operating rooms still where they are operating under these glass windows and people are looking down from above that is actually so true and so even though medicine is no longer still based on like sort of religious belief prescientific method stuff there is still this godlike authority that that doctors have looking down on their patients but anyway yeah so they would dig around in the bodies of these people who had not volunteered to dedicate their bodies to science they just you know well they were just murdered and then they just took them yeah murdered executed potato potatoes so it would grab them slap them on the operating table dig around in them and medical textbooks at the time were treated as religious texts you

weren't supposed to question them if some guy came in was like hey i have an idea maybe we should like wash our hands before surgery they would be like no witch heretic blaspheme like imprison him for having a new idea well i actually think that even though we do have like medical textbooks and like you are allowed to question them there is such an institution around recent medicine that it's very hard to question existing medical knowledge that actually is quite true i mean at the very least it's hard to question the power hierarchies in medical school thankfully we do have the scientific method but but in terms of like the social structures that make it so culty you're actually absolutely right but i don't think it's just the social structure i think that like if you are young

and new like they're not gonna take you questioning anything seriously unless you have reached a higher level of medicine oh yes absolutely and actually you're so right because if you're a medical professor and you have discovered something that's led to an important and very profitable drug you will be sort of exalted and hard to quit that's so true i also think i learned this on my university of bologna tour that a lot of medical diagnoses and cures back in the day three to five hundred years ago were based on astrology so if you were a Pisces you were said to have problems with your feet and if you were an aquarius you were said to have problems with your ankles no i feel like they were wrong because i'm a Pisces so i have a problem with my emotions and the body keeps the score baby

because i feel it in my soul they were just absolutely shooting in the dark medicine and and religion really had a lot in common yeah i mean it sounds like they thought they had all these like super legitimate like sci-fi vibes because they put people on a table and everybody observed but a lot of it was based in like godlike religion vibes and it all looked so legitimate but it really wasn't and it also wasn't very ethical because like you said they were using these bodies of people who did not consent to being used or they weren't really donating their organs they were just kind of getting like axed but there were people who were trying to move medicine forward Hippocrates created the first intellectually based medical school and med school graduates

still recite the Hippocratic oath before going on to becoming practicing doctors so Hippocrates he invented this oath an oath called spread flag number one i think this this oath was founded on pretty ethical principles pretty good intentions that's really to do no harm but there's a lot of ritual surrounding it so the Hippocratic oath is often recited during a white coat ceremony in med school which is this induction ritual for med students where a white coat is placed on a student's shoulders to signify their entrance into medicine the Hippocratic oath that is recited today among medical students is not the original one penned by Hippocrates but the basic tenets are the same it basically says to do the best of your utmost ability to help and heal when you are able to

respect your patients and remember that we are all human and remember don't attempt to play god which i think is interesting so there is all of this kind of like spiritual ceremony surrounding the whole thing it is kind of giving bar mitzvah yeah it is giving bar mitzvah because your whole family shows up and everyone's like okay when's the meal time i think the best thing about summer is getting to do all of your favorite indoor things outside like sharing meals and watching movies and falling asleep on the sofa accidentally oops articles flexible range of styles means that you can do more with the space you've got i just moved into a new apartment and got some patio furniture from article as well as a beautiful

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you're a people pleaser or like me i'm a tap dancer i like to impress people and say yes to everything and that can be exhausting because when you spend all of your time giving you can feel stretched thin and burnt out and that's why therapy can be really important and helpful to give you the tools you need to create more balance in your life i love balance better help makes it so easy to schedule your sessions online with a therapist that you connect with they do a great job at finding people of all backgrounds so you can go online and make sure that you find someone that fits your needs i live in la and getting somewhere in the city takes so long i used to go to therapy in person but then when i left and i got into traffic it would only put me in a worse mood so i've

been going to therapy virtually for almost the last three years and it has changed my life i could not recommend it more find more balance with better help visit better help dot com slash colt today to get 10 off your first month that's better help h e l p dot com slash colt my name is morgan i'm calling from newfoundland i think the cultiest thing about medical school is just having to blindly follow your administration as your leader there are so many rules and timelines that you have to follow and stay on top of and if you try to question them or if you try to suggest a change you're just met with condescension and gaslighting until you get out on the other side hello my name is bethanie and i'm calling from new jersey i graduated medical school in 2014 and the cultiest

part about medical school for me was the influence that the administration had over every part of our lives when i was having trouble with the coursework i had to present myself to the academic status committee and explain what my plans were for improving my scores so the committee tells me that one of the faculty members had seen me in a community theater show over the summer and that if i was serious about staying in medical school i shouldn't be going around participating in these kind of activities and it honestly all kind of intrusive but you know i didn't do any more community theater because i wanted to become a doctor and that's what it was going to take so it makes a lot of sense to me that we've been receiving requests for this episode for years

like since the inception of this podcast for all the years that our listeners have been in med school maybe some of our listeners are like now graduating from a group aka med school that they realized was a cult when they started listening to the show yeah and that's not to say all cults are bad we always say this but just a reminder because sometimes people are coming for us but we are coming for you we're just saying that American med school culture is exhausting and it's so self-sacrificial and it's just ultimately unquestioned because we need doctors but that's the baseline of this episode is how unquestioned it is like no one talks badly about it have you seen Fleischman is in trouble he just thinks that like he's the best person on the planet because

like he's a doctor and it's like okay well have dinner with your family yeah and there are other people who treat him like a monk you know like the business executives in that show are like oh you're doing the Lord's work like that is truly what people say it's like they treat it almost like a religious act even though at the end of the day like you are making a pretty penny not the pretty penny it used to be but you know you it is this balance of like it comes with all this prestige you are actually yielding truly like life-saving results but you are only human and you don't have all the answers and in a sense you're just a cog in the larger cult of the U.S. healthcare system it's it's complicated yeah and I do want to mention a little bit of a devil's

avocado which is that I have friends who are in medical school who truly love it so much like they live and breathe what they studied and they're so happy to go into work every day but that doesn't take away the fact that like it is still a job it is still a profession and you have to find some type of balance in your life that's like what we're saying here that's the thesis of this when like you dive into something and anything a practice a religion a profession a celebrity and it becomes your whole world and you're enthralled by it and it's what you eat breathe love date I think that starts to suede your perception of a lot of things in the world and so it is important to kind of like take a step back and be like what else do I like do I

like hiking or am I still talking about my MCAT scores from 10 years ago that's such a good way to put it we came across this quote in a Forbes article by Steven Clasco who is an MD and it kind of summarized the cult of med school perfectly it said after seven to twelve years of medical education today's young physicians will join a cult centered around four biases competitive autonomous hierarchical and non-creative this happens because medical schools in the US still accept medical students based on their science GPA ability to memorize organic chemistry formulas and MCAT scores and that kind of reminds me of what you're saying before about like miracles and spirituality I don't always think that bedside manner and the human aspect is taken into account

enough in medicine and that's why we have so much like medical racism and why there's so much bias in medicine because the human element has kind of been zapped of it in so many ways yeah and I think a lot of the times the human element is most zapped from the practice when it's a person who's not really enjoying their practice it's a person who kind of did it for the wrong reasons that's something that I come across a lot when I ask my friends who are in med school or in law school it's like are you happy that you did it are you glad you're there and the people who are happy are like yes I am but my friends who didn't want to come to med school and just did it to like please their parents the whole process is a lot more painstaking the whole

process is a lot less enjoyable and you can see the burnout in their faces and their emotions and their personal life and so it is this culture where people brag about their burnout and they never admit to having enjoyed themselves over the weekend and I mean funny enough it kind of reminds me a lot of like the bachelor it's that thing they always say are you here for the right reasons you know like she's here for the wrong reasons like the medical school version of like people who go on the bachelor to become influencers is like he's here for the wrong reasons like he wants to make his parents proud and like not save lives which is still a good place to be it's not that bad of a reason comparatively when you think about why people do things in America

but there's so much like martyrdom in the burnout of med school and that is so culty because you sort of wear your exhaustion and you wear your like self-flagellation with a badge of honor like remember when we talked to Sarah Edmondson in our self-help episode the nexium survivor and she told us how like everybody would be so proud of themselves the harder and more grueling and painstaking and monotonous the tasks that they did were it is sort of like that in med school granted for a slightly more justifiable purpose than joining a self-help program but still you can't help but notice the similarities yeah not to compare med school too in-depth to nexium but it is kind of like there are cults within the cult like there is elitism within the cult of med school

where if you are doing a specialization in like brain surgery and then doing like an extra grad school program where like I mean I literally am not a doctor so I do not know but it's like a nixium where there was like DOS and they got the branding on their ass in med school there's like oh you did a regular med school and you did regular red residency now you're going to do an extra four years for like neurosurgery and those people because they're sacrificing so much of their life to get to that next more elite level are seen as kind of like better higher oh a hundred percent there is something to be said for holding respect for people who have more schooling and are doing a harder job but I can't help but notice that med school takes it to a spiritual level med school

takes it to a power abusive level in a lot of ways a little devil's avocado to my own point and your own point but just to this whole episode is that I do know that when people are enjoying themselves they don't see it as sacrifice so like I do see you I do see those people who like want to become neurosurgeons they don't see that as like an extra four years they just see it as part of their journey it's also language that's used on the bachelor this journey has been so life-changing but I do think it is important to talk about some of the cultiest consequences that can come from a med school experience we've just come across so many cases of people literally passing out in the middle of observing a surgery because their knees were locked and they had to

stay standing without water or sustenance for so long I mean the shit that people's bodies go through in order to become doctors it's cult like I mean it's truly the best way to put it we came across some stories online of some people who have survived the cult of med school lived to tell the tale but not without a few unhealed surgical lesions we shall say hi so I went to medical school in Scotland and can easily say it's one of the cultiest experiences I've been in there's very much a kind of attitude of we're amazing we're the best we're so more talented than everyone else but you have to fit in and act like everyone else otherwise you can feel ostracized and not really included amongst your peers and your seniors will

also treat you in a different manner as well hi I'm Magna from Boston and I think the cultiest thing about med school is that you know very little about it before you get there there is such a culture of exclusivity around med school admissions and being pre-med and taking the MCAT and I think people get so caught up in that that a lot of people are surprised when they get to med school to be like oh I have to examine someone's foot like oh I have to ask about sexual history I didn't really know what being a doctor was I was just so worried about getting in so we have been talking a lot about the whole medical field ultimately and we did want to like niche in on medical school specifically like those four years where professors hold a godlike power

or especially when they've made some kind of prestigious discovery and especially when you want to get into research with them or you want a recommendation from them exactly you really have to cozy up to problematic power structures sometimes I have a friend Dr. Thomas Odin he's on instagram you should follow him he's fantastic but he told me a story about how when he was in medical school at Boston University there was this one teacher who was a godawful professor everyone hated him he was an asshole but he was totally untouchable because he participated in some of the research that contributed to the invention of Viagra so he knew he was hot shit and the university treated him as such that's such a douchebag discovery like of course the guy

who contributed to Viagra is an asshole which by the way and don't quote me on this but I'm pretty sure Viagra was discovered as a side effect to another drug that they were trying to invent by accident and then they were like oh it gives people boners and so then that's when they created Viagra. That's so often how those discoveries are made but yeah Homie was a douche and there was nothing anyone could do about it because he was so lauded by the institution. I mean that's just so classic Viagra bro. We also did find this one first person story from Reddit where someone was talking about uh just the cult-like lengths that people will go to to survive the grueling cult of medical school. For our school's anatomy practicals which if you don't know is like in

person tests where they actually do the thing. Typically the professor set up the bodies in the lab with the flag pointers aka the test questions the night before the practical then locked up the lab and came back in the am but back in the 70s two students used the vent systems to infiltrate the lab and take pictures of the practical stations. Since then the school hired two upperclassmen to camp outside of the room and guard the anatomy lab the night before each practical. They let them do anything even drink beer they just have to stay awake so that students don't sneak in to the practicals and cheat. Dude it's truly like the imperial marines in synonym the like cult militia that was hired to protect this stuff. It's like give them a little

more time to study dear god. Well that also scares me because I'm like okay I do agree with like having little bodyguards to the anatomy lab because I'm like these people should not be cheating like they are going to be operating on real humans. ZockDoc famously a sponsor of this podcast should have like a little review section where they're like I know for a fact this doctor cheated or did not cheat. Oh my god I think about that all the time because like to your point many of us do know someone who went to become a doctor who was like a hot ass mess as a young person and it's like do we want to go blow up their spot? I don't know do we want to give people the space to change? I don't know what if the stakes are as high as life and death? I definitely

think we can give people the space to change maybe that's why medical school is so long because they're like okay you have four years to change and then if that's not enough you have another three to seven years to really lock it down. I think that's fair enough we all are human and human error has been a part of life and death for a long time. Yeah and I mean that reminds me of like why it is important to question these kinds of hierarchies and these kinds of structures like medical school and like medicine in general because it's only through people who have questioned institutions that progress gets made. I mean French people famously have protests like every five minutes and they have universal health care and so medical students should be allowed to complain

and should be allowed to protest every once in a while so that they can have rules and regulations like how long a surgery should go for so that things like that don't happen you know and now they do have things where like you are on the clock or you can't work more than a certain amount of hours but those rules and regulations only came by trial and error. Absolutely by people bubbling over the top of what they could handle and throwing down a revolution if the Hollywood writers can go on strike so can medical students. So Issa, out of the three cult categories live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. What do you think about the Cult of Medical School? I think it is inherently a watch your back and stay with me on this because it is related to

the health and livelihood of humans and human bodies. It is your responsibility to watch your back. It is your responsibility to question the systems in place so that you can continuously improve them and continuously make them better because if you're just living your life willy-nilly not questioning anything then like nothing is going to improve and when you're not constantly making progress like you are taking steps backwards. Yeah that's such a good point and it also makes me think of how like I imagine a lot of people who are recruited to slash enlist in the Cult of Medical School probably are natural rule followers right like they follow this very prestigious path not always but there's something inherent about being in medical school that I

think prevents you from being able to question authority and you're right it is the responsibility of people in this quote-unquote watch your back cult and I would categorize it as such as well to um always have like that skeptical twinkle in your eye to know that like you can push back if you must. Yeah and I think again like it is because you do have people's lives in your hand it is a very serious matter that's the main reason like when it comes to like if you want to go to med school you don't it's like yeah of course it's like not a real cult you know it is only your life and like wanting to do it but I think once you get there it's something you have to take very seriously. And invariably the fact that American med school exists in our fundamentally

diseased system makes it cultier right? Yes well this whole episode has made me feel ill I gotta take an ibuprofen and go to bed yeah that's everyone's like medical solution ibuprofen this whole country is addicted to ibuprofen. Oh my god when I was growing up my parents were always just like you're ill take an ibuprofen and have a diet coke bitch. Yeah I do know that the girlie studying for medical school love diet coke that is such that is such a like in the stacks of the library thing to be doing make sure to send this episode to a friend who is in the stacks who is studying whether they're in medical school or thinking about it or maybe they quit send this episode to them that is our show thanks so much for listening we'll be back with a new

cult next week but in the meantime stay culty but not too culty sounds like a cult was created hosted and produced by Issa Medina and Amanda Montel our theme music is by KC cult this episode was edited and mixed by Jordan Moore of the pod cabin to join our cult follow us on instagram at sounds like a cult pod I'm on instagram at Amanda underscore Montel and feel free to check out my books cultish the language of fanaticism and word slut a feminist guide to taking back the english language and I'm on instagram at Issa Medina ISAA M-D-I-N-A where you can find tickets to my live stand-up comedy shows or tell me where to perform we also have a patreon and we would appreciate your support there at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult and

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