You see, interns don't know very much, just enough to be dangerous. This derives from the fact that they have little to no meaningful experience. They know what they read in Med I and Med II, and they can parrot their handful of attendings from key rotations during Med III and Med IV, but after that, silence.
What they mostly lack is experience which allows them to see the big picture and to know what the general course of a patient is likely to be. When a patient such as the one in a previous post comes in, they can wax prolific about the FENA (fractional excretion of sodium) and pre-renal, intrinsic renal, post-renal, Bartlett's, Gittleman's, etc., but they probably don't know that renal failure requiring dialysis carries a mortality in the ICU of 60% and they certainly don't understand the contribution of poor functional status to prognosis in critical illness. Because they don't teach those big picture things in medical school. They teach biochemistry and physiology. (Medical Educators everywhere, take note.)
An analogy would be: you take your 1982 Honda Civic to the mechanic and the apprentice comes out and tells you that they're going to torque the head bolts to 80 Newton-Meters and fill the transmission with 750cc of whatever weight synthetic oil. Who cares? We want to know if you can fix it, how it's going to run afterwards, and how much it will cost.
