“A better metric, and one that we should all care about, is whether resident surgeons are less well trained and skilled when they come out of residency now than before. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes to support this notion from colleagues, but I’ve seen no good evidence to prove it. Without good data, it feels more like the usual griping each generation seems to have about being the last great one.
“The concerns of those training physicians are valid and should not be ignored. However, if patients aren’t harmed and education doesn’t suffer, we should probably err on the side of treating our doctors-in-training as benignly as possible. As I’ve discussed before, depression and other mental health problems are already common enough during training. We want to be sure that as we create doctors, we aren’t sacrificing human beings.”