Medical school

Driving medical education reform through intellectual honesty

Education

April 3, 2026

We are nearing the end of the academic year, and I recently found myself standing in front of a room of first-year medical students offering what I called “observations.” Not punishments. Not a lecture. Observations. And an invitation. Because what I had been seeing was concerning: academic dishonesty, inappropriate use of artificial intelligence (AI), emotional volatility, and a level of disengagement that felt at odds with a curriculum intentionally designed …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

The medical referral process: Why it fails and how to fix it

Abhijay Mudigonda

Education

February 12, 2026

For clinicians, trainees, and health system leaders, the referral process is meant to connect patients to the specialty care they need. But in everyday practice, this bridge often feels like a maze. Many of us, whether as physicians in training or practicing providers, have watched patients become lost in delays, miscommunications, and inappropriate specialist visits that worsen outcomes rather than improve them.

The consequences of a broken system

In my own experience …

Why medical school DEI mission statements matter for future physicians

Aditi Mahajan, MEd, Laura Malmut, MD, MEd, Jared Stowers, MD, and Khaleel Atkinson

Education

February 7, 2026

When you were applying to medical school, how did you decide which programs to consider? After filtering by stats and geography, you likely browsed school websites. Which ones stood out to you? Did any reflect your identity, align with your values, or feel like a place where you’d truly belong?

Mission statements, particularly those focused on diversity, are often the first indication to applicants that a school values them not just …

The cost of certainty in modern medicine

Priya Dudhat

Education

February 1, 2026

“I don’t know” may be one of the most difficult phrases to both hear and admit. As a patient, fewer words can make you more anxious, and as a health care provider, fewer words can make you feel more powerless. As a whole, the medical community has fostered and embraced a culture of certainty, discouraging the phrase “I don’t know” because of the helplessness it can instill in patients and …

Medical education’s blind spot: the cost of diagnostic testing

Helena Kaso, MPA

Education

January 30, 2026

Medical education has a blind spot.

We spend years teaching students to identify diseases. We drill them on symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment algorithms. By the time they reach clinical rotations, most can rattle off the differential diagnosis for chest pain or abdominal discomfort without hesitation.

But ask a third-year student how much a CT scan costs, or whether an MRI is worth the added expense over an ultrasound, and you’ll often get …