Education

Why standardized medical exams filter for compliant workers

Robert Trent

Education

April 1, 2026

The American education system was not designed to produce scientists; it was designed to produce “interchangeable parts.” Frederick Gates, the architect of the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, famously stated: “I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” While we like to imagine medical education has evolved, the reality is that our high-stakes testing, from the GRE to the USMLE, serves as a high-fidelity filter …

Cultural humility in medicine: Why respect matters as much as science

Kelly Dórea França

Education

March 22, 2026

What does it really mean to care for someone? I asked myself that question during my first months in medical school, when I realized that medicine was not only about science or protocols. It was about people, each one carrying their own culture, beliefs, and stories. And sometimes those stories mattered as much as the diagnosis itself.

One of my earliest experiences was with a woman from a rural community who …

Navigating your orthopedic surgery residency after Match Day

John E. Klibanoff, MD

Education

March 20, 2026

For students matching into orthopedic surgery, Match Day is both an achievement and an invitation. I matched 36 years ago. I still remember the anxiety of not knowing where on my list I would match. Orthopedic surgery was exclusive then. It still is. Recent analyses show that orthopedic surgery offered 916 residency positions across 218 programs in 2024, with a 74.3 percent match rate for U.S. allopathic seniors. That is …

Evidence-based medicine vs. clinical judgment: a medical student’s perspective

Jay Pendyala

Education

March 20, 2026

As a third-year medical student, I always carried three essentials during my emergency medicine clerkship: a stethoscope, a Celsius, and at my fingertips, MDCalc. With a few taps, I could translate uncertainty into structure: the Wells criteria for pulmonary embolism, NEXUS for cervical spine imaging, CAM for delirium, COWS for opioid withdrawal. These tools did not replace my clinical reasoning, but they scaffolded it. They allowed me to justify and …

What Match Day teaches us about unexpected life paths

Kathleen Muldoon, PhD

Education

March 17, 2026

There are moments in life when everything you imagined for yourself fits inside a single envelope. This week, every fourth-year medical student in the United States will open the same one at the same moment. Some people scream. Some people cry. And a few people quietly realize their life just went somewhere they never planned to go. Match Day is the moment medical students learn where their futures begin. Last …

The hidden curriculum: What medical school does not teach you

Vance Lehman, MD

Education

March 16, 2026

In medical school, we only learn a fraction of what we need to know to succeed as doctors. The rest, we learn serendipitously through role modeling, trial and error, and other venues. Without luck, however, we may not learn these factors at all. It turns out that unspoken forces, the so-called “hidden curriculum,” may have a greater impact on our personal and professional outcomes than most people realize. As educators …

The hidden cost of ignoring public health infrastructure

Lujain Mattar

Education

March 15, 2026

Modern health care works tirelessly to treat illness and save lives, yet it often intervenes after disease has already taken hold. The system prioritizes acute treatment over prevention, despite overwhelming evidence that early intervention and public health strategies save more lives, earlier, and at far lower cost. While dramatic rescues capture attention, the quieter work that could prevent disease is often underappreciated, leaving patients and communities to face preventable health …

Medical school endurance: lessons from training for a 10K

Riya Sood

Education

March 11, 2026

During my second year of medical school, I resumed my long-standing hobby of running in an effort to stay physically strong and mentally reset. I enthusiastically signed up for a training program to run my first 10K. In the 12 weeks that followed, I discovered that the process of training to become a runner and training to become a physician share many similar pulses.

The uncertain feeling of readiness

Week one of …

Names as social texts: Navigating cultural identity in medicine

Esiri Gbenedio

Education

March 8, 2026

I cannot recall the first time my name was mispronounced; that is the point. It happened so often that no single moment stands out. The sounds were altered to make them easier. In first grade, a boy loudly said my name sounded like “cereal.” I disliked it but did not tell a teacher. Early on, I learned how others would value attributes like skin color, regardless of my permission.

When adults …

What neck pain taught a medical student about patient trust

Gillian Zipursky

Education

March 7, 2026

My eyes opened with the familiar heaviness of a Monday morning, and as I began to pull myself out of bed, I felt a shooting pain in my neck. I was alarmed, but not wanting to be too dramatic, I repositioned on my side, pushed off and got to my feet, struggled to put a dress on without moving my neck, and headed to class. Finding that the painless range …

End-of-life care and religion: Reconciling Jewish law and medicine

Jonah Rocheeld

Education

March 3, 2026

When my small-group facilitator asked whether withdrawing life support is morally different from withholding it, my classmates offered the usual responses: autonomy, prognosis, and suffering. My mind was somewhere else entirely. It was the first time I had understood something that I had never questioned.

In medicine, categories exist to serve people; in Jewish law (Halakha), people often exist to serve categories. For years I never saw the cost until we …

What chess taught me about clinical reasoning and humanism

Jay Pendyala and Jonathan Berg

Education

March 1, 2026

I first learned to respect silence over a chessboard. Two players sit across from one another, the clock ticking audibly, 64 squares holding more possibility than certainty. You arrive, survey the position, and wait. You gather information, recall principles, recognize patterns, and only then commit, knowing that every decision constrains the future in ways you cannot fully predict.

Now, as a third-year medical student on clinical rotations, I find myself standing …

Informed consent for premeds: Is a medical career worth it?

Michael Minh Le, MD

Education

February 25, 2026

Decades ago, becoming a doctor felt like the obvious choice. People asked, “Why wouldn’t you?”

Today, the question has flipped: “Why would you ever do that?”

I’m a doctor. I graduated from UCLA, and I’m now an anesthesiology resident at Mount Sinai. I also help thousands of premeds get into medical school every year. And when I see doctors leaving medicine or premeds walking away before they even apply, I don’t think …

Why PAs are masters in medicine, not competitors to MDs

Chidalu Mbonu, MPH

Education

February 22, 2026

As my first rotation in surgery draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting not only on anatomy and technique, but on the structure of medicine itself. Surgery teaches hierarchy not as an obstacle but as a rhythm, one that protects patients and preserves excellence. In that rhythm, I found clarity about my role as a PA student: to learn medicine deeply while honoring the lineage of those who have mastered …

Reflection vs. rumination: Is medical education harming students?

Vijay Rajput, MD and Seeth Vivek, MD

Education

February 22, 2026

Reflection has become one of the core virtues of contemporary health professional education. From journaling assignments to mindfulness prompts to competency-based portfolios, students are repeatedly asked to look inward. Reflection is framed as the doorway to insight, empathy, and professional identity formation. But an uncomfortable question is beginning to surface in hallway conversations and faculty retreats: Can too much reflection, or reflection done poorly, actually harm our learners?

At first glance, …

Lifestyle medicine vs. medication: Why prevention is the future

Jenna ODonnell

Education

February 19, 2026

During my first two years as a medical student, I have often been struck not only by how much medicine has advanced, but by how frequently the foundations of health are overlooked. This perspective was shaped early in my career through my first postgraduate role, where I spent three years collecting patient data for a multisite study evaluating a lifestyle-based intervention to reverse metabolic syndrome.

At a data analysis meeting with …

Beyond Flexner: Why we must rethink medical training reform

Ravi Agarwala, MD

Education

February 18, 2026

Our current scheme and its overbearing credentialism is out of date and cannot keep up with a rapidly changing health care environment. Greater flexibility is needed for the well-being of patients and physicians alike.

Professional burnout and anticipated physician shortages continue to be highly debated topics. Indeed, the American Medical Association reports that 45 percent of physicians have symptoms of burnout, and the Association of American Medical Colleges anticipates a …

Why medical education assessment kills curiosity in residents

Mythili Ransdell, MD

Education

February 16, 2026

Sarah, a new attending, has been asked to work with June, a PGY-1 resident who has struggled with new admissions.

On rounds, June recommends a urinalysis for a patient with advanced dementia and new agitation.

“Why a UA?” Sarah asks.

“Behavior changes can indicate a urinary tract infection in older adults,” June replies, confident and fluent.

Inside, Sarah splits. She wants to teach, to pause, invite uncertainty, and help June reason through delirium and …

Curing versus caring in medicine: Bridging the gap in patient trust

Cherie Shah

Education

February 14, 2026

Modern medicine has a lot to show for all our breakthroughs and biotechnology. At an astonishingly rapid rate, we have built a health care system that can map the genome, replace a heart valve, and monitor vital signs from a wristwatch. All this to show that medicine’s success has always been measured in cures, and in that pursuit, we have forgotten to care. This is where medicine fails.

A cure is …

Why medical students need health care economics

Angela Wei

Education

February 13, 2026

These days, it is not uncommon to hear complaints from doctors, nurses, and other clinical staff about policies made by “higher-ups.” Stories of physician burnout, frustration with appointment time limits, and dissatisfaction with policy changes are all too familiar. As a medical student, I have often felt this sentiment that “administration is the enemy.”

However, this past summer, I had the unique opportunity to serve as a medical student business intern, …