Students, educators, and physicians writing on KevinMD about medical school: admissions and what they select for, the cost of tuition and the debt it leaves, the curriculum and what students say it does and does not teach, Step 1 and the test-prep industry, pass/fail, mistreatment and depression in training, the match, Caribbean schools, and what should change. Most contributors are students writing while still in school, many of them anonymously. For what physicians have said about paying off that debt and the money decisions that follow, see Physician personal finance: what physicians say about their own money, in their own words. For a maintained record of what students and physicians have said about medical school on KevinMD since 2004, see Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words. For what physicians and deans have said for and against affirmative action and diversity in admissions, see Race and medicine: what physicians say, in their own words. For what international and Caribbean graduates have said about the Match and visas, see Immigration and medicine: what physicians say about immigrant doctors and immigrant patients, in their own words.
When dealing with patients and families coping with life threatening illness, one of a physician’s greatest interventions may be that of empathy. Defined simply, empathy is the responsiveness to the emotional state of another person—we try to understand another’s experience. It is a process that requires effort and intention. Sympathy is an awareness of another person’s situation and is an almost “autonomic” type response. Sympathy is important and is part …
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Empathy should be the basis of patient care
Doctor, do you know a lot about human nutrition? You said “yes?”
Congratulations, if that is true. But I suspect that South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s infamous quote “you lie” is applicable.
American medical schools traditionally have done a horrible job with their curricular treatment of clinical nutrition. University curricula are controlled by the faculty and, when the faculty don’t know or care much about a topic, it often gets short shrift.
I …
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Should medical schools be mandated to teach nutrition?
Very few are as starkly aware of the transience of life as those working in the healthcare profession. We are expected to be, for want of a better word, immune to it; as if each death we face is somehow a vaccine that will eventually, with regular booster doses, provide us with enough immunity to be resistant to the Grim Reaper.
We spend years studying, arming ourselves with pages and pages …
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When medical students first deal with death
Looking back on the first three years of medical school, it’s hard to imagine living through the endless days of studying again. Weekends were spent cooped up in the library and there were countless holidays that I wasn’t able to spend with my family. Instead, they were spent memorizing indecent aspects of the human anatomy and performing DREs on strangers. There are better ways to get to know a person …
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Heed the 4th year medical student spoils
My wife and I met in medical school. Both of us went “straight through” from high school to college to med school. So, like most of you, we are as educated as it gets.
But when our daughter reached “school age,” we decided to homeschool her. My son, who is two years younger, followed in his big sister’s footsteps, so we are now homeschooling both of our children.
Unlike our traditional paths …
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What medical education can learn from homeschooling
After undergrad, and before starting medical school, I worked for two years as scribe in the emergency department. I followed emergency physicians and completed their charts as they saw patients. I would also remind the physicians of various tasks to complete, alert them of abnormal lab values and pull up x-rays to be interpreted.
One of the reasons I wanted the job was to gain experience in medicine, first as a …
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How working as a scribe prepared me for medical school
I never realized before how much work goes on behind the scenes to prepare and conduct these interview days, but I sure do now. As a Chief Resident, I schedule residents to attend the applicant dinners, lunches, and tours, and to spend time with the applicants our lounge. This makes the actual interview days go by much smoother, because two of us are present at all times to speak to applicants and answer any …
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Residency interview tips from a Chief Resident
Suzie remembers what it felt like to be fifteen. She can still hear the creek of the steps leading to the third floor and the quaint finished bedroom that housed her grandmother that fateful summer.
Originally, Grandma was set to move into the small room next to Suzie’s parents. But after his first night in the attic, Billy refused to set foot up there again. So Dad lovingly wrapped Grandma in …
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Reaching the pinnacle of medical education
Every year medical school applicants feel confused and in the dark about why they have been rejected by medical schools. They do not understand what they did wrong or what they need to do differently when they reapply. Whether you are a premedical student trying to make sure to “do everything right” or a medical school applicant who has not yet …
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6 reasons why applicants fail to get into medical school
Like many of my colleagues, I teach and supervise students, residents, nurses, and respiratory therapists. I’m also the medical director of a PICU. Overall, I’ve been teaching and doing administration for over 30 years. And, like most of my colleagues, I never received any formal instruction at all in how to do these things. To some extent I got help from my own mentors, primarily by watching what they did, …
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Reward or punishment in medical training
One of the things I have come to really enjoy and appreciate is the opportunity to interview the subjects of my articles and multimedia pieces. In a way, being a reporter reminds me a lot of being a physician-in-training – both roles require me to go into a room, learn an individual’s story inside out, and present the learned information for a further goal.
In my Public Issues Reporting class, the …
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Reporters and doctors are more similar than you think
It’s amazing how quickly you can lose track of time as you power through the books. Once everything is setup — coffee to the left, pens and highlighters to the right, Grooveshark playlist perfectly tuned — you can suddenly look up and realize that three weeks have flown by and there are 123 multiple choice questions to be answered in the morning.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve learned …
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6 things I wish I had known at the beginning of medical school
As a third year medical student, I spent one afternoon each week at a health clinic at a community hospital affiliated with my medical school. This health clinic was focused on primary care for patients with HIV, and many of our patients were poor, homeless, immigrants, or uninsured. Many were also living with their diagnosis in secrecy and had to hide their medications and medical bills from family members.
One of …
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Treating heart failure on a budget
There comes a moment when you’re forced to step beyond the things you know. It’s a split second — an instant adjustment from the safety of recollection to the insecurity of the unknown. Day after day we head into the library, hunching over twice-reviewed notes and hidden behind piles of books yet to be read. We push ourselves to work harder, study longer. We toil knowing that each page holds …
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A medical student is forced to step beyond the things he knows
If you’ve ever spent time in the operating room, you are already familiar with the words the circulating nurse uses to signal the time out – the few minutes before a procedure begins when the surgical and anesthesia teams review a patient’s case. If you’re a non-medical type, or a medical student whose surgical rotations are scheduled late in the 3rd year, then you’re just as clueless as I was …
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Appreciating the beauty of a time out in the OR
This is an account of my first encounter with an in-patient from a little while back — I have provided only minimal details about the patient to maintain compliance with HIPAA.
After a firm handshake with each of us, our preceptor embarked purposefully up two floors to our first in-patient encounter. As we walked, I peeked into the rooms with the door left ajar and wondered what brought each individual to …
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A medical student’s first patient encounter
The third year of medical school is a lesson in humility. In the OR, you’ll invariably cut the suture too short, or too long, or too slowly. On the floors, the one laboratory value you haven’t checked is the only value vital to the patient’s survival. And just when you think you know everything there is to know about a disease, the Attending Physician will keep asking you questions until …
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When pimping a medical student can backfire on a doctor
As an MD, nutritious and healthy cooking and eating are very important to me.
We as physicians do not receive adequate training in nutrition, healthy lifestyle choices, and disease prevention in general while in medical school or in residency. On top of that, we work long and difficult hours, often overnight shifts during which we consume processed, fatty foods, void of any nutritious value and we find ourselves suddenly with an …
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Physicians do not receive adequate training in nutrition
