The NP papers: piling on the bullshit
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Who would have known that medicine can't be learned by writing useless papers?
As a patient, who would you want taking care of you - a physician who has spent more than a decade of their life studying medicine and training in residency, or a midlevel NP who spent much of their didactic curriculum writing bullshit papers on health disparities, whose clinical training consisted of little more than shadowing a preceptor for a few hundred hours? If today's NP degree programs are any indication, it's unfortunately the latter.
And how ironic that this future midlevel has been tasked with writing papers on "role clarification" of different healthcare professions, when it seems that the NP profession and the AANP are hell-bent on blurring the lines between physicians and non-physician practitioners, and pushing for NPs to have full practice authority. Maybe - just maybe - if all NPs had to write papers on "role clarification", they would know how to stay in their physician-supervised lanes!
It's truly sad that an NP student in their final semester doesn't seem to know jack shit about basic medicine. Is that really a surprise, when most NP programs top out at 600 or so "clinical hours"? A "final semester" fourth-year medical student, on the other hand, will have already completed a myriad of clinical rotations. In third year, mind you. (Many medical schools are even transitioning to an early exposure model with clerkships starting in the second year.) Perhaps if NP students stopped spending so much time in their didactic curriculum mentally masturbating to the concept of the "Theoretical Basis of Advanced Nursing Practice" (whatever that is) and titillating themselves to the idea of engaging in "Healthcare Policy and Leadership", they might actually get to learn some basic medicine. Seriously, how in the actual fuck can you expect to meaningfully shape healthcare policy and become a leader when your clinical knowledge base is essentially peanuts? Meanwhile, first-year medical students are actively drowning in their basic foundational science classes such as anatomy, biochemistry, organ systems, etc.
It's refreshing at least some NPs (such as the one above) are beginning to see just how subpar and deficient the current state of midlevel NP education is. The AANP and NP programs have yet to realize that real medicine is 1) taught in medical school and 2) not learned by writing bullshit papers with more fluff than Cheetos. Of course, with the insanely lucrative profits to be made off gullible students paying tens of thousands in tuition for online-only NP programs where trying to find your own clinical preceptors is analogous to an episode of Squid Game, it's much more convenient for the governing bodies to turn a blind eye. Unfortunately, when these clinically incompetent students graduate with their newly minted nurse practitioner degrees, vulnerable patients pay the price.