What can Tiger Woods teach us about pre-med competition and the medical school gunner mentality? A lot.
I was recently watching Tiger’s latest win, his 76th win on the PGA. Tiger was dominating the competition, not unlike your classmate in your organic chemistry or biochemistry class that just crushes every test and sets the curve for everybody else.
What was different about this …
Tiger Woods and the pre-med gunner mentality
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
The senior resident hauled our little band of medical students down to the radiology file room. As he dug through the heavy manila x-ray jacket searching for films, he told us the patient’s story. “This 63-year-old lady was really sick when she came in. Heart attack a couple of years ago. New trouble …
The Wax Pencil Sign will soon be obsolete
Dr. Chris Nickson recently asked, if a Martian landed on Earth and looked at how we do medical education, what would she think?
Could it really be true that so many dedicated, brilliant people with the same objectives could be doing exactly the same thing at the same time without sharing their resources? … That they could put so much work put into teaching sessions that so few actually …
4 ways asynchronous learning can benefit medical students
When we told the patient and his family that the mass in his lung was highly concerning for cancer, he didn’t say anything. His daughter asked about his symptoms. His son-in-law asked when and how he could get a definitive diagnosis. His wife asked when he could go home. Finally, he spoke.
“I’m sorry for being so much trouble.” The tone was casually apologetic, …
Our medical education system does not tolerate emotional cracks
“I have no idea what to write.”
“I want to stand out.”
“I want to be different.”
“I want to have a theme.”
These are all comments I hear from medical school applicants as they start thinking about what topics to include in their medical school personal statement. I find that applicants often feel pressured to be unique and to write something the medical school admissions officer has never read before. But if you …
Writing your medical school personal statement: Tips and myths
I’m not sure why my parents were surprised when I told them that I was applying to go into family medicine. It seemed like a logical transition after spending six years working in public health and primary care before medical school, but from the perspective of Taiwanese immigrant parents, I couldn’t have made a more absurd career choice. I was confronted with comments such as, “Most people choose careers to make …
Am I smart enough for family medicine?
Once again, medical schools continue their annual fraudulent and misleading statistics in regards to primary care workforce production. The Dean’s Lie is back and rampant across the country. It only seems to get worse.
When will they learn?
USA Today: Match Day: More medical graduates enter primary care
About one-quarter (11,762) of the applicants matched to resident positions that train doctors to be on the front line …
Match Day primary care aftermath: The Dean’s Lie continues
A letter from a medical student at the end of her gross anatomy course.
Dearest Walter,
The time we’ve spent together over the past few months has been wonderful, but I’m afraid it must come to an end. We knew this day would come. I must move on with my life, and you must move on, too. We will never see each other again, but I will never forget you. You have …
The bond between medical students and their cadavers
Institutional leaders in academic medicine are frustrated by what they perceive to be a short list of limited assets that can be used to guide or encourage individual and group behavior: faculty rank and/or institutional titles, compensation and budgetary authority, and space.
Even though the organization’s work takes place at the bottom, done largely by self-directed professionals, an academic medical center’s professional intellect is rarely recognized as an asset, let alone …
An academic medical center’s professional intellect is an asset
I just took step three of the national board exams – the final in a series that all U.S. physicians must pass to practice medicine unsupervised. The two day exam, composed of multiple choice questions and simulated patient cases requiring free-text answers, brought up subjects that we haven’t thought about since medical school (Sick children? Terrifying.) The test also shed some light into how doctors think under pressure and why reigning …
Do board exams teach doctors to overtest?
In the satirical novel The House of God, author Samuel Shem writes about experiences as a medical student at Harvard. In the novel, many famous quotations are used that have been passed on from generation after generation of medical students and residents. Some slang terminology is also referenced and characters are created to illustrate the qualities of certain types of students.
One particular student that is found in every medical school …
Should medical schools find a way to fail gunners?
After graduating from college I had the opportunity to spend two years working at the Institute of Medicine on a variety of health care improvement topics. When it came time to apply to medical school I noticed an odd dissonance—the challenges I had been grappling with at the IOM were not manifest in most medical school curricula. I knew that multidisciplinary teams …
The physician’s role in cost containment is absent during training
Prior to entering the medical field, my preconceived notion of what makes a good doctor essentially compromised of compassion, intelligence, and the ability to think fast on ones feet. Although I continue to believe that these professional qualities are paramount to excellent patient care, I am finding that other, less obvious proficiencies are also required. Ironically, these skills that I have in …
3 business skills doctors need to know
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As a medical student, I am in direct contact with the past, present and future of science. Sometimes, for instance, I read books concerning the history of medicine that bring me back to how diseases were diagnosed and treated a hundred years ago. Bloodlettings, leeches, herbs, and venoms.
It’s amazing to see how medical science has progressed since then. It’s only been a hundred years. We have gone from the discovery …
The role of medical research in developing countries
After a long day on the internal medicine ward at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, I rushed across town to lead that evening’s two-hour group diabetes visit at Union Square Family Health Center in Somerville, MA. So when my preceptor asked me if I’d lead the group on a field trip after the two-hour visit, it was the last thing I wanted to do.
Although we had discussed taking our Brazilian patients …
Can group visits be an ideal way to practice primary care?
gunner: a pre-med or medical student who is ambitious to a fault. They often throw other students under the bus, put their accomplishments and grades on display, and generally make life miserable for any student who they perceive to be a threat to their own success. In short, they are what Hermione would be if she was a Slytherin.
On my blog, I am fairly vocal about my disdain for gunners. They …
How to avoid becoming a gunner in medical school
A resident is a person who has an MD, meaning they have completed 4 years of school, but they are not yet qualified to actually do anything. An MD is just a piece of paper saying you did your time in the lecture hall/lab. Residency is where you learn how to be a doctor. The term “resident” originates from the old days in which newly-minted doctors were actually living at …
When it comes to medical residents, patients have a choice
I was startled to learn, when interviewing medical school applicants, that tagging along with a physician, or “shadowing,” is a common practice among high school and college students these days. Yes, I did say students as young as high schoolers.
Shadowing provides a way for students to observe at first hand what it is like to be a physician, and helps them decide whether the career will suit them. Medical school …
Is physician shadowing harmful for patients?
Of the 2.7 trillion dollars that will be spent on health care in these United States in 2012, more than $600 billion will be wasted. Excess testing and procedures, inflated charges, archaic business models, futile end-of-life care and exploding drug costs are some of many reasons. Predicted 25 years ago this crisis has been the focus of extensive academic analysis. It is reasonable to assume that with the primary goal …
Learning about costs: A gross failure in medical education
“Your hands feel like velvet,” the 94-year-old woman told me as I pushed on her abdomen in the emergency department on a Friday night.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” I told her.
“That’s pretty sad,” she said, and her abdomen quivered as she suppressed a laugh.
I walked out of the curtained room and briefly presented her findings to the resident on call. In return, he showed me …
We hide behind vague words for fear of not living up to specific ones
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