Current medical students - the way I see

I left my medical school for almost 24 years now. I still remember my lecturer taught me about pathogenesis of many diseases in reference to the normal physiology and function of specific organs. They taught me to be critical and analytical about every single problems. All the time we were reminded that not everything in medicine is definitely 100% correct. Some of the cases are straight forward and you can make the diagnosis or conclusion almost immediately. However, some of the problems tend to be a little bit complicated that require your ability to formulate and putting a serious thought into it based on your knowledge, experience and your readings to come up with the nearest possible answer. This is where the arguments and discussions are important. Obviously, at the end of the day, you will get the final diagnosis after specific test or gold standard test performed. The process of getting to the final diagnosis require a flexibility in thinking and the student must be able to reason it out to support their argument. That's the reason why in the medical school, first thing that you need to learn during your clinical years is taking a history from the patient followed by physical examination. Occasionally, you don't need to do any investigations to confirm the diagnosis. 95% you will be able to make a correct diagnosis after history taking and physical examination. All the student should develop the skill in getting relevant informations from patient and confirm it with physical examination to further strengthened the evidence. A doctor is just like the CSI officer who are trying to gather all the evidences and come up with the most possible diagnosis. It is an interesting process. Some of the diseases have overlapping clinical features and biochemical derangement, but you need to choose the most likely diagnosis. Of course, if we can do a specific test for the confirmation, finally we will get the right diagnosis. In order to go through these processes, we have to strengthened our basic knowledge on physiology, pathology, biochemistry and not to forget human anatomy. I always reminded my students on the basic things in medicine. We have to remember everything that we have learned in the early years of medical school. In order to recognise abnormalities, we have to know the normality first. Otherwise, we can't make any conclusion out of it. It is not an easy task. Students nowadays, are very poor in applying knowledge to patient. All of them are so call 4 flat students. They read a lot but unable to identify the relevancy of such informations to the patients. They have tunnel vision. Their arguments and discussion on certain diseases are very immature. Overlapping of symptoms and clinical signs are too much to handle. They easily get confused. Mind you, they are 4 flat students. Worse still if they don't have interest in the subject or in medicine. They do medicine for different purposes. Peer pressure or parents pressure. I take final year medical students from the public as well as private universities. They are equally bad but the public university do slightly better.....It is worrying situation. Probably, we need to look back at the presence curriculum or something have to be done. We have seen the prove from the quality of housemen that we have nowadays. The quality of our doctors are deteriorating, not only in skill but in knowledge, soft skill and attitudes. How much we specialists in the government hospitals can teach and guide them in 4 months posting if their basic medical knowledge is almost 0%. It is a tough job.......good luck to all of us ...