An excerpt from This Won’t Hurt A Bit (and other white lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood. Copyright © 2011 by Michelle Au. Published by Grand Central Publishing.
Let’s look at this first purely from the perspective of personal investment and expectation. To practice medicine, …
Why do people decide to become doctors anyway?
by Andrew M. Ibrahim and John A. Brockman
Despite the landmark progress of recent healthcare reform, it missed the mark on long term cost control by failing to address medical education.
Radical changes are needed in the way we finance tuition and how we teach our students.
While last month a new graduating class of medical students celebrated their Read more…
A moral imperative to address the costs of training our doctors
by Alison Block
It’s one of my earliest memories: I’m wrestling with my brother, and I’m losing, because I’m five and he’s seven, and he’s bigger and stronger than I am. So I bite him, hard.
Instantly I know I’ve crossed some sort of line, and I employ my most primitive defense mechanism, shouting out, “He bit me! Jon bit me!” I feel shame, because I am old …
by Christina Palmer
It never surprised me when my medical school classmates said they would “never do family medicine.”
I knew exactly how they felt: why would we choose to go into a field where physicians are undervalued, underpaid, buried under administrative paperwork, and where patients do not get the time or attention that they need?
Despite the warnings against it, I am pursuing family medicine as …
Family medicine is the kind of revolution we want to join
When applying to medical school, the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) asks aspiring physicians if they would like to be considered “disadvantaged” applicants or not.
Many premedical students find themselves troubled by this question and wonder, what does it mean to be disadvantaged? How does being a disadvantaged applicant affect my medical school application? According to the information American Association of …
Does being a disadvantaged applicant affect my medical school application?
I recently concluded a trip down to Nashville, TN where I gave my talk on the health care-social media intersection at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
My audience normally consists of physicians and hospital staff, so talking to students was a refreshing change.
I had the opportunity to have dinner the night before, and breakfast and lunch the day …
Talking social media and health reform with medical students
Listening to patients for the past two weeks, we learned quite a bit about what patients appreciated about their doctors and what had left them hurt and confused.
The good:
M., an elderly lady with a very close relationship with her primary care physician, said she had been to many bad doctors in her life. She knew right away that her current doctor …
What your patient appreciates, and what causes hurt and confusion
Recently, I received a call from the son of some old friends. This 30-year-old man has been an elementary schoolteacher for the past few years and recently decided that he would like to go to medical school and eventually become a surgeon. He wanted to know what I thought of the idea.
Suppressing the urge to tell him not to even consider …
Think about medical school tuition debt before becoming a doctor
After an exciting and challenging day of caring for patients and teaching students, a third-year medical student on his family medicine rotation says to me, “I really like what you do, but I just cannot afford to go into family practice.”
I realized that by “afford,” he was referring not only to finances but also to the expectations of his parents, friends, and Read more…
Myths devalue the image of primary care
by Christopher Bayne
I still remember the first time I entered the anatomy lab. Heck, I remember the first time I entered the hallway leading to the anatomy lab.
I wouldn’t say an anatomy lab “smells.” That is, an anatomy lab doesn’t smell “bad”: the odor can’t be defined as good or bad. Really, it’s neither. But the scent is distinctive. If you’ve been …
A medical student goes back to the anatomy lab before residency
Skeptical Scalpel writing at KevinMD.com in a post giving some advice to second year medical students nails the problem with medical education on the head:
Rather than forcing [medical students] to memorize information, we should be teaching you how analyze and synthesize it as it relates to your patient.
Our increasingly sophisticated and robust understanding of the pathophysiology of human disease processes coupled with the growth in diagnostic testing power …
Why medical education needs to evolve away from memorization
by Chris Chen
Recently, I stood in the back of a boisterous, packed auditorium as each of our school’s fourth-years received their match letters and proudly announced in front of friends, family, and classmates where they would be headed for residency.
As peers enthusiastically cheered each other, significant …
Why medical students should be passionate about health reform
I was talking to a young man who is starting medical school this fall. His tuition at one of South Carolina’s newer schools will be $40,000 per year. That’s admittedly on the high end. On the low end, it runs a paltry $33,000 per year.
And this is all after college, of course. He and others like him are taking out loans to the tune of $240,000 to pay for their …
Why medical education needs to be more affordable
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by mdstudent31
Going into medicine from a suburban community in the northeast, I never really knew exactly what family medicine was as a specialty. I had heard of it before, but did not see it in action until going to undergraduate school in the middle of Pennsylvania. It was there when I began …
Can family medicine really be defined?
by Sunjay Devarajan
“Mrs. Adams” slowly ambled into the family medicine clinic on a Wednesday afternoon. I immediately noticed her slight hunch as she made her way into the lobby.
“A case of back pain?” I thought to myself. “Perhaps an exacerbation of the scoliosis she’d had since childhood?” I shrugged my shoulders and carried on with my …
Being a physician is not just about medicine
Medical school is a wonderful, but at times difficult experience. As you start this fantastic journey, there are a few “rules” I think might help.
1. You can drink from a fire hydrant, but you’ll need to learn how. The amount of information you are going to be exposed to in medical school is logarithmically more than you had to learn in …
Rules to help you during medical school
Match Day marks one of the most important days in a medical student’s career.
A computer algorithm “matches” prospective doctors with the residency program they’re destined go to.
It’s also a look at the future trends for various specialties. With a major part of health reform about to be implemented, one naturally gravitates towards primary care, where there currently is a …
Match Day 2011: Family medicine grows, but enough to save primary care?
I sometimes wonder if we spend too much time talking about professionalism.
It is not that I don’t think we should promote professionalism. Of course we should. But many discussions of professionalism descend into overly academic and scholarly treatises that end up obscuring rather than clarifying the values such discussions hope to promote. It may be a mistake to overly …
Humility in medicine and our academic training environments
An excerpt from In Stitches.
I see dead people.
Eighteen bodies covered with plastic, lying on gurneys. An occasional toe protrudes to verify that beneath the shiny black tarp, a dead person lies.
I smell dead people, too.
Or at least the thick chemical stench of formaldehyde, tearing at my eyes and packing my nose, enough liquid preservative in here to float a yacht. The smell rises from the bodies and from a dozen …
I see dead people, an excerpt from In Stitches
by Stella Safo
It is 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 …
Learning to love primary care via an emergency department rotation
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