I am quite aware of the education physicians obtain. I employed over 800 physicians including primary care and specialists in many different fields. I also worked with university physicians in the field of sleep and funded medical research.

And it might surprise you that I lectured on physician practice management at a local medical school annually and also at various physician and other health care conferences and consulted with the Advisory Board (a hospital-oriented consulting group on integrated health care delivery systems). Not on "medicine" but on how to deliver it to the community.

I like physicians and I have had a relationship with well over a 1000 of them, and I have more than two friends who are physicians.

I don't know where you came in on this thread, however, the issue is whether academics are the "smartest people in the room". And the answer is it depends on the subject matter.

Academics and physicians are smart people, but like my daughter who is studying like crazy to pass her final medical board that "brainpower" is being focused at learning a lot about medicine and not much else. The study of medicine can be so demanding, that it leaves little time for other things.

In hindsight, our primary care medical practices would have provided patients better care if we had used a more integrated multi-disciplinary approach to treating patients even at the primary care level.

I don't know where you came into this thread, but it was about whether academics are the smartest people in the room and the answer is it depends on the subject matter.

I suspect neither you nor I could survive on the streets as well as a homeless man that has been surviving on the streets for years. Does that make us dumb or is that simply something we don't know much about. When it comes to surviving on the streets, who is the "smartest person" in the room... you, me, or the guy that has done it for years.

If you want to say, that my "ego" is a problem since after nearly 70 years, I have come to respect the fact that no matter how much education you have or how little education you have, you can't be the smartest person in the room on everything... then I guess I have ego problem... or maybe you do.