"Just geeting into medical school is very difficult, and it's hell once your there. And takes forever."
"One way you could get the answer is to compare average salaries across the board of all MDs and all engineers (if we're talking about MD doctors). The MDs would have the highest average I'm sure."
Both comments are quite related. Doctor's have a monopoly on medical school. They don't let many qualified people in (I know many people with 4.0 GPAs throughout high school and college yet they couldn't find a medical school to accept them). Thus this monopoly has created a shortage of doctors (I live in areas which have a huge demand for doctors but there isn't enough supply). What is the result of a huge demand and an artifically low supply? Right, the doctors earn more money. Thus I think neither of those points are useful to this discussion. If engineers could control all the engineering colleges then they would also limit supply and have significantly higher salaries too.
As to the discussion I think it is also biased. It takes a special type of person to have the drive and desire to go to graduate school/med school. Generally these people are more intelligent than the general population. So you are comparing engineers who might have just a 4 year degree (or less) to doctors who have the drive and desire to go through many more years of schooling. Wouldn't a better comparison be engineers with masters/doctorates to medical doctors? This would eliminate the bias toward people with the intelligence and desire to go on to more schooling.
I personally have a bad impression of medical doctors. In my hometown the peditrician diagnosed every single one of his patients with asthma (including me). I took harmful drugs for years until I just gave up on them since I saw no effect. Later I was told that the doctor didn't perform any of the right tests - so there was no way he could have made a correct diagnosis on me. Doctors tend to do this type of thing - based on obviously incorrect information. For example it is common knowledge that exposing a young child to multiple environments (clean and dirty) gives them a great immune system. The more contaminants your immune system sees as it grows, the stronger it becomes. So what did doctors say for decades (and many still do)? Yep keep your child away from animals. Well guess what happened, those children soon developed alergies to animals. But the children raised with animals, have their immune system strengthened and have a significantly smaller chance of having any form of allergy. Wow, common sence. Yet you see everyday doctors surprized by that information. So many of them just seem to be stuck in the dark ages. I bet the majority of doctors think that women should have the same medical treatments as men. Well guess what, many current studies are popping up showing the exact opposite (for example tylenol is far more effective in men than women). Well wasn't that obvious? We have completely different hormones running through our bodies, so why should men and women be affected in the same mannor. Everytime I have a virus infection, I'm prescribed antibiotics. Guess what, antibiotics don't affect viruses (Note: those people who are immunocompromised by a virus such as HIV, have a good chance of also being infected with bateria, so those people should get antibiotics but not healthy people like me). I could go on and on with simple examples of how doctors really often don't have a clue as to even the most common sense things. So many of them are stuck in the dark ages - and don't read the latest medical discoveries. None of this means that they are less intelligent, but I certainly don't find many of them to be any smarter than the engineers I know.
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