And if you don’t match for residency, which is a possibility after you’ve dedicated most of your adult life to up until this point, you cannot practice as a physician in the US.

But aside from all this there are some wild tools we use. There’s this entire company called sketchy that makes cartoons to help remember microbiology. Anki is a flash card software platform that many swear by to help jam info in. These are most popularly used around board studying (our boards are taken in three steps, first one being 7 hours, second being 8 hours, and the third taking two days of 8 and 7 hours(?)).

But as stated above, the amount of medical and science knowledge in the world is constantly expanding. Doctor’s expertise is knowing how to identify an abnormality and knowing what tools to use to figure that out. And knowing exactly what to search for. Really just expert level googlers. Though, we do have this very handy website called UpToDate which is essentially medical google. Again, very handy but only because we know how to look at a patient’s complaint and distill it into a couple of words that are highly specific and unique.

Being able to jam knowledge into your head is half the battle. A really good doctor knows how to take all this knowledge and apply it dynamically.