As a clinician-academic who published in The Lancet during medical school, I think this goes a bit far. Unfortunately student doctors are encouraged to publish whether or not they actually have an interest in research… but that shouldn’t discount the work of those who are genuinely engaged.

But certainly we should always approach the literature critically, including the author list, journal of publication and its peer-review practices, and the methods.

Well, that is a statement..! As an MD PhD with over 60 (co-)publications including multiple in top 1% journals I can say for sure that this is untrue. Of course this may be different per topic and country, but there is perfect research being published by non-PhD scientists. In fact, the PI from a top-tier US university I collaborate with for over 10 years doesn't even have a PhD.

This is really far too broad a brush.

Do most medical students publish useless case studies trying to jockey for residency spots and signal hustle/devotion? No doubt!

But there are a good handful of medical students who are still (surprisingly) in it for the medicine and not the money. And that handful is exceedingly capable; no reason they can’t publish valuable work with the right collaborators and resources.

A med student can absolutely contribute useful work, especially with good supervision. The issue is more that inexperienced authors plus publication pressure plus easy tooling is a bad combination

a friend of a friend who did a stint in biomedical academia told me that the researchers in their field did not hold research coming from the medicine community in high regard

LLVM was a masters thesis project (not medicine related but research by non PhDs should not be disregarded imo)

I guess it depends on who the coauthors and PI are - some academic mentors can be overly trusting and ‘hands-off.’ A lone medical student’s self published paper shouldn’t be worth much though…

In the end it is about personal integrity and idealism, no matter what the titles are.

Totally different if someone's self image is that of a researcher for benefit of humankind or if they pick the career because they want to drive a Porsche.

What has PhD got to do with anything. Research is research regardless of who does it if using proper scientific method.

Such obvious common sense appears not obvious after all.

Since we have seen that 50%+ of findings even in medical and other natural sciences are not repruductible it's obvious that even PhD people are mostly incompetent.