Doing philosophy and the future of the 'good doctor' paradigm.

Abstract

The author argues for the substantive doing of philosophy (as opposed to learning about it) as part of medical training. The paper presents a view of medical education as diminishing the critical thinking skills and humanistic values of future clinicians in favour of fact-recall and pattern recognition. This is due to increasingly assessment-driven curriculums and the need to meet extremely high, and rigorous, institutional and industry/sector standards. The author argues that current medical training favours a particular kind of learning, and therefore produces a particular kind of clinician, that may meet these standards and thrive in competitive and high-pressure practice but may not be best for patients. Furthermore, as artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies rapidly change the landscape of medicine, current medical training may also not be best for these clinicians. The 'good doctors' that we are currently training, face a 'survival of the fittest situation' whereby they are no longer able to survive in a changing landscape, and therefore medical education is failing our future 'good doctors'. Changes to the content and delivery of medical education need to happen now to mitigate this failing and give doctors: first, what they need to survive; and second, what they need to properly care for patients in a changing industry, increasingly served by AI. Doing philosophy has the potential to cultivate the thinking skills, inter-personal skills, personal attributes, and humanistic values needed by the 'good doctor' of the future.