"I think the answer is that the organs are sold to people on waiting lists and laundered through legitimate-looking organ sourcing methods and the doctors themselves are either legit or corrupt and trying not to get caught while also performing their legit job, but this information comes through mystery fiction so I take it with a grain of salt."

"Oh, that's a plausible explanation."

"Another possible source of custom is people who flunked out of med school but have enough knowhow to look better than nothing to desperate people."

"I wonder what legit med school dropouts do."

"Study something else, I expect, likely related--I don't know what the certification requirements are for EMTs, but that's one possibility."

"Or nursing, but I hear the skills are way different - guess that's a selling point for a dropout -"

"I know just enough about nurses to respect the hell out of them."

"Well, the ones who are any good, anyway."

"That caveat generally applies."

"True enough."

"But nurses have an extremely demanding and vital task, for which they get a small fraction of the acclaim doctors receive."

"And of course only some doctors are any good likewise."

"Exactly. And people who have no business being in the medical profession seem much more likely to want to become doctors than nurses."

"You think? I haven't noticed a trend."

"It pays well and is prestigious. It seems logical."

"It's also a longer course of study and it involves a lot of debt and academics."

"True. Perhaps not, then."

"It wouldn't surprise me if they attracted different kinds of lousy people, though."

"That I strongly suspect."

"Some teenager my dad took in for graffiti once told him 'high school bullies become nurses if they're girls and cops if they're guys', he was just trying to needle my dad and that's not how my dad got into the profession but it seems like it probably has anything truthlike to it."

"Oh dear. That I have very little insight on, but it does sound concerning."

"I'm not sure how many of each there are so I don't know if it would be even theoretically feasible to fill out their ranks exclusively with high school bullies."

"Yes...the police have a worse reputation than nurses, but then their job description is more explicitly violent..."

"Yeah, and more of their interactions in general are adversarial. There's probably nurses who are nice as long as their patients take their meds and don't make inconvenient requests at three a.m. or whatever."

"Well, that certainly puts a strong limit on how nice they are."