I remember in my undergrad days that the life science majors were generally focused on memorizing stuff. In deed I noticed that most traditional education relied very much on rote learning - the goal is to get students to remember things and regurgitate them on tests. Having a poor memory and low patience threshold, that's not me. Through all my schooling up to graduate studies this was a disadvantage in most classes. My lack of memory skills forced me to get good at figuring things out. Classes that graded on accomplishment - getting stuff done - versus testing, I scored well. Testing was always a weakness. I was not one of those 4.0 undergrads.

In the real world I learned that innovation requires figuring stuff out. When trying to do what hasn't been done before, rote learning is of little value. In my post-graduate studies, I became entangled with medical imaging (MRI and CT), so have had some experience with the medical culture. Though I think that part of the field is far more open to new ideas than most of the medical community. Radiology and diagnostics may attract the few MDs who still want to think ;-)

I've noted before on the sloppiness of medical research, especially misuse of math. Some of it is necessity: used to be frowned upon to do large scale experiments on humans, well, prior to 2020 at least. It's multi-parts ignorance due to deficiencies in teaching the math and science, and arrogance and a big part politics of funding.