Instead of focusing on rare conditions, why dont medical schools make the more common diseases their main focus?
A. The more common conditions are often the least understood. Traditionally, medical schools have a base in a large teaching hospital. Often this is a general hospital, which admits mostly indigent or severely ill patients, and in doing so, skews the patient population. For example, a student might see a huge number of end-stage chronic alcoholics who dying of delirium tremens and cirrhosis of the liver. This same student may see common conditions very infrequently.
