Medical education

2,303 articles · Since 2007

Articles, page 96

Why we should nurture creativity in medical residents

February 8, 2013Feb 8, 2013

I recently had the opportunity to read Daniel Pink’s Drive. I read it partly to understand why pay-for-performance often fails to accomplish its goals for complex tasks, such as patient care. However, the thing I found most interesting about this…

I recently had the opportunity to read Daniel Pink’s Drive. I read it partly to understand why pay-for-performance often fails to accomplish its goals for complex tasks, such as patient care. However, the thing I found most interesting about this book was the way in which creativity is deliberately inspired and cultivated by industry.

I could not help but think about why we don’t deliberately nurture creativity in medical trainees. Why …

A view from Mexico: Reforming resident work hours

Cesar Lucio, MD

February 3, 2013Feb 3, 20134

Mexican medical residents have been submerged in a bygone system for decades. More than 100 work hours a week, scanty pay and psychological warfare are the everyday burden for residents in our country. You can read more about the working…

Gradual progress is being made thanks to 30 years of pushing …

Reform medical education to fix the primary care shortage

Kevin R. Campbell, MD

February 2, 2013Feb 2, 201311

When I was in medical school in the 1990s, students were given a bleak picture of the life of a subspecialist. We were told that there would be few job opportunities and that the only way to ensure a job was to pursue a career in primary care. Many of my classmates did go into primary care but the majority of us accepted residency positions in surgery, neurosurgery and other …

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From Mom: Here’s what it takes to be a great doctor

Anonymous

January 31, 2013Jan 31, 20132

My mom wrote me the following letter during my first semester in medical school. She has been a patient, and a mother/wife/sister/daughter of patients. She has been around countless doctors. Here is her take on what makes a great one.…

Dear Son,

I am so very proud that you are becoming a physician and that you chose this profession, not for the prestige or the financial advantages, but because you want to …

Learning about human relationships and the art of medical practice

Pamela Wible, MD

January 31, 2013Jan 31, 201312

Pet Goats and Pap Smears. After two decades of formal education, today I’m finally set loose with real patients. It’the actual moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life. We’re each assigned to a family doc for the month. I…

An excerpt from Pet Goats and Pap Smears.

After two decades of formal education, today I’m finally set loose with real patients. It’the actual moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

We’re each assigned to a family doc for the month. I scroll down the list of third-year medical students, place my right index finger beside my name, slide …

Countertransference is a reality that must be grappled with

Ilana Yurkiewicz

January 29, 2013Jan 29, 20134

“Sometimes, how you feel at the end of an interview can be clinically revealing,” my preceptor says. “How does this patient make you feel?” *** “Mr. M?” I ask gently, knocking on the hospital room door. “May I come in?”…

“Sometimes, how you feel at the end of an interview can be clinically revealing,” my preceptor says. “How does this patient make you feel?”

***

“Mr. M?” I ask gently, knocking on the hospital room door. “May I come in?”

“Hello? Hello?”

I enter at what I think is an invitation to me, but see that 79-year-old Mr. M is speaking into the phone instead.

“I’m sorry, I can come back…” I start to say. …

Building residency training from scratch: What would you do?

angienadia, MD

January 25, 2013Jan 25, 201312

Back in the day, legend has it that when space programs were just developed, NASA soon discovered that ball-point pens will not write in zero-gravity. Unfazed, NASA spent a large amount of money developing pens that will work in space,…

It turns out that this legend is only half true, but the lesson remains – sometimes, we get bogged down trying to solve …

The strong tradition of mentorship is unique to medicine

Reflex Hammer

January 21, 2013Jan 21, 20132

A friend was working an overnight shift in the ER for one of her mandatory rotations, so I popped in to observe. The ER was surprisingly quiet. A classmate was also observing that night, and like me, he was standing around, bored. We spotted an electrocardiogram (EKG) readout lying on a desk where a resident was working, and we asked him …

AMA: Accelerating change in medical education

Jeremy Lazarus, MD

January 17, 2013Jan 17, 20132

Today’s medical students will care for tomorrow’s patients, and future physicians need to be prepared to thrive in a rapidly changing health care environment. Future physicians will need to be able to navigate new and increasingly complicated health information technologies, understand and use advances in personalized medicine and many will need to know how to lead accountable care organizations.

Gaps between …

Be the bad guy with good intentions

Shara Yurkiewicz

January 14, 2013Jan 14, 201324

“You’re not sorry.” Within two days two different patients said this to me, each with hatred in his voice. Each time I was alone, each time I had known the patient for only a few minutes, and each time the…

“You’re not sorry.”

Within two days two different patients said this to me, each with hatred in his voice. Each time I was alone, each time I had known the patient for only a few minutes, and each time the rage was directed at me and only me.

For seven months, I had avoided being the bad guy. When a patient got upset, he accused my superiors, and I hid behind their …

Read more…

Be the bad guy with good intentions

Is it justifiable to judge a paper by its author or funding source?

Ilana Yurkiewicz

January 13, 2013Jan 13, 2013

Doctors use different standards to judge scientific research depending on who funded it. They judge research funded by industry as less rigorous, have less confidence in the results, and are less likely to prescribe new drugs than when the funding…

Those were the results of a study published by Harvard …

Holding doctors accountable: The role of teaching hospitals

Ishani Ganguli, MD

January 7, 2013Jan 7, 2013

Fourth year medical students are starting the interview process to match into a residency program - their next and potentially final stage of training. Over the next few months, these students will rank the programs they visit based on features…

Fourth year medical students are starting the interview process to match into a residency program – their next and potentially final stage of training.

Over the next few months, these students will rank the programs they visit based on features such as geography, research funding, and hospital affiliations. But there’s another factor to consider – one that gets little attention but that probably matters more for the kind of doctors they’ll become. …

Incremental improvement in medical education is not enough

Michael Moore

January 5, 2013Jan 5, 2013

Going to a new medical school working its way through the accreditation process is, by design, a bit of an experiment. A school wants to establish itself as distinctive, but in the end, it seems that doing anything radical is out of the question. The drive to conform to professional standards and expectations is a good thing. It generally prevents schools from bilking students of grand amounts of money while …

Medical schools don’t care about the primary care shortage

Reflex Hammer

December 28, 2012Dec 28, 201250

I attended a talk by the Dean of Admissions of one of the most competitive medical schools nationwide. The topic was primary care and community health. He talked at length about how not enough medical students were entering primary care. He put up some graphs showing that the most lucrative specialties tend to be the most competitive ones, with primary care among the lowest-paying and least-competitive. He said that medical …

4 bad reasons why medical students choose a specialty

Jessica Freedman, MD

December 27, 2012Dec 27, 20124

“I love the hours.” “I want to be just like Dr. Smith. He has a sweet practice.”“I want to make a ton of money.” “I want to make a ton of money.” These are some bad reasons why medical students…

“I love the hours.”

“I want to be just like Dr. Smith. He has a sweet practice.”“I want to make a ton of money.”

“I want to make a ton of money.”

These are some bad reasons why medical students choose a specialty. Most medical students decide what specialty to pursue when they are in their mid to late 20s. While we all think …

The transition from resident to attending physician

Dawn Baker, MD

December 19, 2012Dec 19, 20124

The patient had arrived for a urology procedure with a blood glucose in the 400's. He suffered from a recent stomach bug and had gotten off schedule with administration of his meds. While his GI symptoms had subsided, he was…

The patient had arrived for a urology procedure with a blood glucose in the 400’s. He suffered from a recent stomach bug and had gotten off schedule with administration of his meds. While his GI symptoms had subsided, he was feeling crappy overall. I decided to cancel his case and went about initiating treatment to get his blood sugar under control. When I informed the urologist of my findings and …

Medical eponyms and their connection with Nazi crimes

Ilana Yurkiewicz

December 17, 2012Dec 17, 201212

In 1977, a group of doctors began a campaign to change the name of an inflammatory arthritis after discovering it was named after a Nazi doctor who planned and performed gruesome forced human experimentation that killed thousands. In one of these experiments, for example, Hans Conrad Julius Reiter inoculated Buchenwald concentration camp inmates with the microbe causing typhus, resulting in the deaths of over 250 people. The …

How my ER rotation turned me into a primary care doctor

Stella Safo, MD, MPH

December 14, 2012Dec 14, 20125

It's Saturday night at an emergency department (ED) in Boston, MA, and I am faced with a medical student’s dream dilemma: which one of the many interesting cases should I observe? Should I watch trauma surgeons operate on the 17-year-old…

It’s Saturday night at an emergency department (ED) in Boston, MA, and I am faced with a medical student’s dream dilemma: which one of the many interesting cases should I observe? Should I watch trauma surgeons operate on the 17-year-old gunshot victim or work with the ED docs to assess whether a 59-year-old woman is having an acute stroke? That is exactly what I adored about emergency medicine as a …

To the health professionals during hurricane Sandy: Thank you

Jessica Gold

December 12, 2012Dec 12, 20122

It's 3:30 am and my clock alarm is singing some song that I used to like. I roll over to turn it off all the while thinking to myself: “I am waking up to stand for the next 12 hours…

It’s 3:30 am and my clock alarm is singing some song that I used to like. I roll over to turn it off all the while thinking to myself: “I am waking up to stand for the next 12 hours straight holding a retractor. No one is going to care that I am there, and if I am even acknowledged …

When comparing teaching hospitals, context matters

Joanne Conroy, MD

November 24, 2012Nov 24, 2012

The Dartmouth Atlas Project released a study on October 30, 2012, entitled, “What Kind of Physician Will You Be? Variation in Health Care and Its Importance for Residency Training.” The data, and the conclusions of the report’s authors, bear closer…

The data set focuses on the differences in the intensity of services that Medicare patients receive, and highlights the academic medical centers rated by U.S. News and World Report as …

Medical education

Articles, page 96

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