Oh, crap. It’s political season again.
Let me introduce this piece by saying I used to think lawyers must be smart, but now that I’ve been a lawyer for 40+ years, I’ve met too many stupid lawyers to believe that anymore. I also once thought doctors are very smart people, but watching the GOP presidential debates is making me wise up, and I just got educated further by reading this article.
“Being smart includes having the ability to analyze new data for validity and, thinking creatively, draw new insights from existing common knowledge. As a neurologist in practice for 20 years and one who has worked closely with many neurosurgeons I can assure you, Dr. Ben Carson does not meet the above criteria. Not even close. He is a painfully ignorant person. …
“From his statements on the pyramids as grain silos, his rejection of extensive, confirmatory evidence of climate change, to his glaringly unworkable alternative to Medicare, most Americans out of the conservative media bubble are familiar with the litany of uninformed, intellectually shabby statements he has made over the last few months.
“My point is that neurosurgeons are not automatically smart because they are neurosurgeons. To get through training and have any sort of practice they must be disciplined, have immense ego strength, a reasonably good memory, and have mental and physical stamina. However, like many other doctors, they are not always smart.
“Neurosurgeons, like other surgeons, can be outstanding technicians but that is different than being intellectually brilliant. A truly brilliant internal medicine specialist once told me that ‘you can train anyone to perform a procedure’. I’ve seen surgical assistants perform technically difficult procedures with stunning alacrity. It’s the old rule: do something enough times and you will get damn good at it. …
“So, professional journalists, bloggers, and all those who post comments at Daily Kos and elsewhere, please stop using the word smart to describe Dr. Carson in the first clause of your sentence. Leave that one out and stay with the subsequent clauses detailing his ignorant beliefs and intellectually sloppy policy proposals.”
So, there you go, a plausible explanation of how a wildly successful neurosurgeon can be breathtakingly stupid about everything else. If we learn nothing else from Campaign 2016, it’s that doctors aren’t necessarily smart.