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PATIENTS LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT DOCTORS ARE AT least passingly familiar with the medical texts that line their offices. Not so, says a report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine. A study of the reading habits of second-year medical students at the University of Southern California found that most coped with 22,000 pages of required and recommended reading by ignoring the bulk of it.

According to Dr. Clive Taylor, the reading time expected of a U.S.C. medical student is roughly 71 hours a week. Actual reading time is closer to six hours. Though one diligent student in the survey did spend 15 hours a week hitting the books, four confessed to having done no reading whatsoever.

Taylor is sympathetic to the students. The problem, he says, is not ill- prepared doctors but professors trying to cram an explosion of medical knowledge into a fixed four-year program of study. His prescription: "If we add anything further to the medical curriculum, let it be spare time."