Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Medical 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.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0% alcohol and a source of vitamin D. Corona Serro, the official non-alcoholic beer of Milano Cortina, 2026. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes 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 to slide 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 over your life. Medicine has become your entire identity and you're working for free, but you're being told that exhaustive.

of re-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. In an algorithm, gets a, 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 valued 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 megachurches 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, it's 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 shock-hunting beers five minutes ago. It is frightful. If not a frat bro who was borderline 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, yeah, I think I would like to go on WebMD actually. No, I'm 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. 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 culty, 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 hyperstructured, almost like a private kindergarten for grownups. 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 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 and 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 live. literally have to move with you to the bum fuck 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 going to 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. And the pharmacy suiticals. Yeah, the pharmacy suiticals. pharmacy and the pharmacy suiticles and health insurance, which in America, as we know, is not free.

This is just like a grab bag of culty words. We've like put them in one of those bags that contains 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 med 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 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 in training, that has the potential, in my opinion, to get pretty dangerous. Hi, my name is Laura. I'm from Belgium, and I work as a GP. One of the most cultious things about med school for me is the 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 Orleans. I believe that medical school is a cult because of the great lengths 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 the students paying over 70 grand a year for tuition. They will protect the abuser at all costs. 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 homogenous group of people selectively studying this one thing. But at the same time, we would 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 unquestioned aspects of that lengthy medical school experience that make it super culty. Yes, a lot of things aren't questioned like going premed 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 postback. 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 and undergrad. And 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 bitch 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 postback. 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 postback 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 have just partied and gotten a linguistics degree and then done a postback? 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 U.S. News include Harvard, John Hopkins, UCS.F, University of Toronto. shout out to our producer, hashtag Canada, Stanford, University of Washington, UPenn, and Oxford. It's not a long list, so it's probably pretty hard to get into situations. Oh, exclusivity is a huge part of this quote-unquote cult. Also, shout out to my parents who are professors at Johns Hopkins Medical School. It is important to put the S on the end of Johns. Why? I don't know. Because there are two of them. Oh, conspiracy theory.

Yeah, that is a fun historical fact about Mr. Johns and Mr. Hopkins, but let's get into the history of medical school cultiness. Health and healing have long been at the heart of religion, been before Hippocrates, 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 mention that because I am in Italy right now. traveling in Italy, and I recently took a tour of the oldest university in Europe, which is the University of Bologna. 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 old medical equipment, anatomy equipment. It's so creepy. In this operating theater, say, three, 500 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 going to do with that she is after I'm done. 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 pre-scientific method stuff, there is still this godlike authority that doctors have looking down on their patients. But anyway, 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, potato. So they 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 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 going to 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 500 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 at 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 religion really had a lot in common. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like they thought they had all these super legitimate like scientee 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 oath was founded on pretty ethical principles, pretty good intentions. It'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 patience, 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? My name's 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 Bethany 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 felt 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 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 it's 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 Fleishman 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, 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 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.

love it so much. 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. It's what you eat, breathe, love, date. I think that starts to swayed 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 Stephen Clasco, who is an MD. And it kind of summarized the cold of med school perfectly. It said after seven to 12 years of medical education, today's young physician, will join a cult centered around four biases, competitive, autonomous, hierarchical, and non-creative.

This happens because medical schools in the U.S. 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 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, in their emotions, in their personal life. And so it is this culture where people brag about their burnout and they never admit to having enjoy 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? 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 say wise, which is still a good place. 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 Nixium, 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 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 or higher. Oh, 100%. There is something to 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 a 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. That's true. 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 unheeled 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 have 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's 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 niche in on medical school specifically, like those four years where professors hold a godlike power, 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 Oden. 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 god-awful 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, ugh, 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 a.m. 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 upper classmen 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 Synanon, 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. Zoc Doc, 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 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 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 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 watcherback cult, and I would categorize it as such as well, to always have like that, 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 a living 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 got to take it.

ibuprofen can 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

isa madina and amanda montel our theme music is by kacey colt this episode was edited and mixed by jordan more 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 Wordslut, a feminist guide to taking back the English language. And I'm on Instagram at Isa Medina, I-S-A-A-M-D-I-N-A-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 if you'd like our show, feel free to give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you don't like our show, rate other podcasts the way you. rate us.