Well, certainly that explains the appeal of a group like AMSA. This poster suggests their views change during residency:
Academic physicians are more liberal than community physicians as a generality. Also, medical students are far more liberal than physicians. There is something about 80 hour weeks with minimal reimbursement tends to change some minds about unlimited self-sacrifice to humanity. Half of your liberal classmates won’t be by the time they start practicing.
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I think part of it might also be the “groupthink” that happens on campuses to a large degree. Once students get out of an environment where it’s only acceptable to think one way (leftward), they often have a better chance of realizing how much bigger the world is than that, and that there are actually lots of people with divergent viewpoints. I saw that happen a lot with my college classmates from an extremely liberal school.
I think a lot of medical student’s that join AMSA have no idea what the organization stands for. They sent me the first letter when I was first accepted to med school offering a free medical dictionary with membership. Luckily, I was aware of their pinko-commie-left-wing-marxofacist agenda and steered clear. Who needs a medical dictionary when you have Wikipedia!
Oh come on. Young people in general are more liberal than older ones. This is no surprise.
I’m with Graham on this one.
I’m about as involved in organized medicine as any medical student can be, and certainly AMSA is more liberal than the general physician medical community, and the AMA’s Medical Student Section is more liberal than the general House of Delegates. But, this is just a reflection of the age gap which exists throughout society. It isn’t unique to medicine.
Then join the liberal side again when turning 65 because they come under the control of the government for the precious social security and medicare. I pity the person that can’t save and plan for themselves.
A couple of points:
1) AMSA’s membership numbers are inflated because loads of schools more or less bribe students to join up (we got ‘free’ copies of Netter’s Atlas and the school subsidized most (all?) of the membership fee)
2) Maybe the fact that my med school is one of the most expensive in the country has something to do with this, but in a class of 200 if you ask what specialty people are interested in and why maybe 5 say ‘primary care because I want to save the tired hungry masses’ everyone says things like derm and rads, surgical specialties or maybe Pulm/Crit Care and Cards. And the reason is always a combination of ‘It interests me’ and ‘it pays well enough’
I think too many comentators look back on med school and remember Vietnam and the medical students against the war and just project current student politics onto that template.
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