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The USMLE is necessary but not sufficient, other stuff is required to be a competent doctor (and NPs/PAs certainly become doctors without passing the USMLE, and while not actually good enough certainly make some people comfortable).
Preparation side of things gets weird, these days most applicants use uniformly the same few "best in class" test prep resources like Sketchy and First Aid, hypothetically someone could pass the USMLE without the structure and context of course work but it would be nearly impossible because of the sheer amount of crap you need to know.
As you know but the other poster likely doesn't, a lot of what is involved in being a good doctor involves practical experience doing shit in the hospital (sometimes physical skills and the like) with training wheels for awhile before you do it on your own.
You don't want your first time doing X to be doing it by yourself with no supervision, it's a terrifying thought.
Incidentally some states in the U.S. do allow lawyers to became barred without law school but I don't know the details of that.
Can't really do that in the same way for medicine.
Lastly it's entirely possible to pass USMLE and be ass as a physician for a variety of reasons including skills atrophying and laziness.
I believe you. It's not like the PLAB doesn't occasionally let absolute lemons through, and I wish I could say that every doctor with the same nominal degree I have was someone I'd entrust my medical care to.
God knows that I've sometimes felt scared and befuddled by how much autonomy the UK saw fit to grant me, back in India it was far too easy to hide behind a consultant's skirt, but that's not really a possibility when the senior psychiatrist hasn't had to interpret a CXR longer than I've been alive. I personally think it's nigh miraculous how doctors once managed without ready access to the internet.
They used to have less shit they could do so it was easy to have everything memorized aka we used to do jack shit, especially overnight (and reference textbooks are a thing!).
Also like 50 medications total lol.
Reminder that the treatment for a heart attack used to be ETOH and that was the better option than the alternative (bedrest).
Hmm.. It seems to me that you're describing late 1960s and early 70s medicine, whereas what I had in mind was closer to early 90s, before computers and internet access were truly ubiquitous.
I think by then, most of medicine had solidified, or at least we wouldn't be too outraged at the state of knowledge.
My grandpa finished med school back when penicillin was the hot new thing, DNA hadn't been discovered. Hell, when he entered med school, the notion of surgeons specializing was rather novel. I think they were at General Surgeons, OBGYNs and orthopods when he finished med school, if not by the time he finished postgraduate training in gyne.
I presume that the understanding of anatomy was most of the way there. You're not going to discover a brand new organ past the 1950s (and recent claims of new organs are rather tenuous at best, is the discovery of a new part of the lymphatic system or some kind of fascia that important?). And surgery would definitely be a practical field above all else.
While I am exaggerating the amount of growth is still pretty rapid - compare the size of First Aid now with 20 years ago. You'd be shocked at how much has changed since the early 90s, especially with respect to over specialization.
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