Dear Dr. Wible,
Thank you for the work that you do. I have been following your push for humane medical education for several months now. I finally decided to contact you after reading your article about how “burnout” is actually abuse. I am a med student entering my third year. I have been consistently hearing horror stories from other students about the …
My attending is throwing scalpels. What do I do?
As a fourth-year medical student, I love introducing myself to patients as the “extra eyes and ears of the team, so feel free to tell me anything you forgot or would like to address, even if you think it’s irrelevant or burdensome. I will be your advocate.”
As I establish rapport with them, the walls come down, and they often provide important information that helps my team provide the best care …
The inspiring reasons why this medical student wanted to become a doctor
Aristotle said, “To avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.”
Sometimes I wish I was nothing; surely, that would just be so much easier. I screw up all of the time. And I hate it. My latest gaffe was killing our simulated patient by causing him to aspirate. I’m sure no one in my group is still persevering on the events that unfolded during the sim. I also really …
It’s OK for medical students to make mistakes. Here’s why.
I’ll just start this off by saying that I am not exactly sure where I stand on the white coat thing. One part of me loves the white coat as a symbol, a shield against disease, and a place with pockets to put my things; and then there are other days when I just want to throw that germ-ridden cotton barrier to the doctor-patient relationship in the trash, roll up my sleeves, …
The white coat doesn’t mean much anymore
Critics have been making the rounds again with a warmed-over complaint: International medical schools that offer U.S. teaching hospitals financial support for clerkship programs are unfairly buying access for their students instead of “more deserving” U.S.-based students. As the proud dean of a Caribbean medical school, I want to set the record straight yet again: This argument is hollow and based on a false dichotomy. In fact, the argument has …
Why paying hospitals for clerkships is good, and necessary
“Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”
– Sir William Osler, “The Father of Modern Medicine” (1849–1919)
In this modern era of oncology, the potential extent of malignant spread is staged by high-quality scans. Further, when …
Learn the physical exam by following an oncologist
Hi Pamela,
I’m a medical student in the UK. Though I’ve only been in med school since September, it has already taken its toll on me. Before I started, I was so in touch with my emotions, spirituality, and nature. Now I feel so empty and desensitized. I hate that when faced with the horrible circumstances of another person, I just don’t feel …
Medical school has killed my soul. What can I do?
This question has been circulating in the academic medical world for years. As an intern and resident, I would hear complaints about how “unready” they seemed. The grievances often include adjectives like ill-prepared, lazy, or uninterested. The complaints have burgeoned over time, and the examples are numerous in my institution: Students show up late to rounds with coffee in their hands; one med student had the gall to go directly to the attending and …
What is wrong with medical students today?
Sometimes, it’s difficult to recall that single defining moment or person that sends you on the path you’re meant to take in life. I was fortunate in that I found that experience halfway through my undergraduate career at the University of California, Davis. I had recently lost my grandmother; although I’d wanted to help, all I’d been able to do at the hospital was translate for her. That overwhelming sense …
From volunteer to family physician: A medical student’s journey
Every fall, medical schools welcome nearly 20,000 college graduates. They arrive anticipating endless hours of lectures, too much coffee, and infinite facts to memorize. There is one thing they do not expect, however. I know. Forty-nine years ago, I was one of them.
The first day I walked onto the wards was in spring of 1967. I was in St. Louis, doing my second year of medical school. Previously my presence …
A routine heart exam. An unexpected problem.
I burned out for the first time in my life about three months after starting medical school. The surprising thing was that nothing out of the ordinary happened, I was doing exactly what they told me to do, pre-reading from lecture notes and recommended textbooks, going to lectures and labs, and trying to study and review what I learned that day in the library.
The problem was, that after a 45-minute …
From burnout to balance: How this medical student did it
“Let’s say a Chinese patient comes into labor and delivery … simply logs onto the CultureVision website. Next, click on the Chinese section and finally click ‘Labor, Birth and Aftercare.’ Just that quickly you have the information you are looking for.”
CultureVision boasts that it is the “first comprehensive, user-friendly database that gives health care professionals access to culturally competent care.” The website’s automatic slideshow, entitled “Did you Know?” shifts …
The problem with cultural competency in medical education
Though I am two years into my residency, I still experience flashbacks to my time as a medical student on the wards. The adrenaline of arriving at the hospital 2 hours before rounds, scrambling to see my patients, constructing a note that no one would ever look at, and preparing a hastily-constructed presentation to deliver in a half-performance, half-examination outside of our patient’s room.
I remember being the object of a …
A resident’s guide to being a medical student
It is February of our last few months of clinical rotations. I am a rising fourth-year medical student at a well-known East Coast institution with a not-so-bad track record, I guess you could say. I scored in the top percentile for the USMLE Step 1, honored my third-year rotations, and have comments from attendings about how I am destined to succeed in this career. One might think that at this point …
A star medical student feels like he made a terrible decision
As an early third year medical student, I had a few attending physicians tell me that MD stands for “make decisions.” I find myself subject to these sorts of pep talks when I answer their clinical questions with a response influenced by a high pitched vocal inflection that suggests that I’m uncertain.
For example, while being pimped on the next step in managing a patient, I might have responded with a …
Tips to rank your match list. Here’s how this medical student did it.
In this article, I’ll discuss a medicine-specific strategy that many of my physician colleagues and I have used over the years to learn dense, complicated information quickly and effectively, and to do well on board exams.
These are the two most important tenets of studying for a medical board examination:
1. Find the highest-yield information and memorize it cold. With active methods such as mnemonics, teaching others, lecturing “to the wall,” writing notes …
A physician aces his USMLE and ABIM board exams. Here are his tips for success.
Last May, I reflected on my path from medical school to starting a health tech company in San Francisco. In an environment which fetishizes the “dropout founder,” I always met perplexment when I said I planned on returning to medical school. Now that graduation day is around the corner, I thought I’d shed light on my choice for clinical practice and what I learned on the other side.
Medical …
I left medical school for a startup. Here’s why I went back.
As physicians, we are trained to look for change. We look for changes in lab findings and change medications, and we ask our patients, “what has changed since I saw you last?” We are always trying to get our patients to change in one way or another. Doctors are hardwired to seek changes that produce a dopamine release in our brains. We love it when patients see an improvement in …
This medical student went to rehab. Here’s what she learned.
In 1978, my mother interviewed for dental school. On her post-interview tour of the school, her male tour guide assumed she was applying for dental hygiene school and showed her only those areas of the school. Upon my mother informing him that she was applying for dental school, he smirked and said, “Good luck getting in, you’re a woman,” and walked away laughing.
Of course in 1978, overt sexism was neither …
Misogyny in medicine is alive and well
Studies have varied in their estimates of depression in medical school students, but they all show a similarly startling trend. Medical students have a higher depression rate than their non-medical counterparts. This culminates later in life with physicians with higher than average alcohol abuse problems and higher than average suicide rates, with male MDs 1.5 times as likely, and female MDs twice as likely to commit suicide than their Read more…
Medical students are depressed, but they’re taking the wrong drugs
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