Where in the world did you hear this? Don't trust anything else that person told you.
Aside from some low-income clinic hours for certain specialties (which is objectively a societal good, not to mention typically specific to a given specialty, e.g. OBs have an OB clinic not primary care) no doctor is spending 6 years of "excess schooling residencies" learning anything.
Med school is 2 years of classes then 2 years of rotations where the students - who aren't yet doctors - do 4-12 weeks of rotations through various core and elective specialties. After they graduate they're now doctors but have 3-6 years of specialty-based residency training where for 80-100 hours a week, 50+ weeks a year, they do nothing but their specialty. ACGME limits weekly hours to 80 (I think over a 2-3 week average), but 90% of the doctors I know said they regularly broke that and just didn't log the extra time.
Especially in surgical residencies, all you're doing is your specialty-specific stuff during that period of those.
You just said what he said, but with emphasis on 100 hour weeks for years on end being good instead of bad. Why did you disagree with me, then go on to list how much doctors work before the get to practice on their own? His point was they get too much training, with much of it being irrelevant (not all). If you're this angry and reactive, you really shouldn't be a doctor.
People here seem to love the NHS. In the UK, doctors are not forced to study something irrelevant for four years in college, then do med school, then do a 4 year residency (i.e. age 30). They are often done by age 24, and ready to help.
The closest thing to "extra training" they get is fellowship-related rotations, but even this is all things they'll see in practice so they need to know how to handle it initially, if for no other reason than so they know when to offload it to a specialist.
> They are often done by age 24, and ready to help.
I'm sure this is fine for whatever the equivalent is to an urgent care doctor in the UK (bottom of the barrel family med in the US, probably not board certified - e.g. failed the exam or not qualified to take it - or doing transitional residency because they didn't match anywhere), but I'm not really interested in my orthopedic surgeon or neurologist just getting through their training as quickly as possible.
There are lots of ways the US could increase the pool of doctors, and most doctors are probably paid way too much (paradoxically, probably most egregiously at the low end of skill), but "cut out a bunch of training" is a dumb way to do it.
