by Kal Shah
Kal Shah, a first year medical student at the University of California Irvine who received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in Bioengineering, has given iMedicalApps the scoop on how the iPad is being used by himself and classmates.
He highlights how medical textbooks are being utilized, along with an app he feels is better at note taking than the popular Read more…
How an iPad is replacing medical textbooks
I recently spent a week in Ireland, taking in the sights and spirits.
I was actually there for work too – visiting the University College of Dublin and the Mater Miserecordia Hospital – or the original Mercy Hospital as they refer to it. As the future of primary care, residency work hours, and the healthcare insurance system continue to cause angst in the US, we often find ourselves referencing what our European …
Medical school and medical training in Ireland
The first time I let a medical student try to intubate was in August. Now in my final year of anesthesia residency, I had volunteered to mentor a third-year medical student for a week. A few weeks in advance I got an email with the form she had filled out. Anesthesia experience: none. Excited to learn: yes.
I met her on Monday morning after she navigated through the preoperative holding area …
How to intubate: Teaching a medical student during anesthesia residency
I’m not sure about the validity of this study: Free Access to U.S. Research Papers Could Yield $1 Billion in Benefits.
Quantifying how much money will be saved by increased efficiency due to open access seems like fuzzy math at best. However, we do need better access to medical journal articles. As a researcher, I’ve constantly fought the battle against firewalled journals. I am fortunate to be part of a university …
Paying for access to medical journals
by Tayson DeLengocky, DO
The physician shortage in Texas has commanded an unusual amount of public interest in recent weeks.
The Houston Chronicle (Oct. 17), Star Telegram (Oct. 19) and Fort Worth Business Press (Oct. 27) all devoted space to the growing shortage of physicians in Texas and the steps necessary to correct the problem. The three articles recognized that the availability of residency slots is the determining factor in addressing the …
Addressing the physician shortage in Texas
by mdstudent31
Recently, AAFP News Now released an article titled, Unprofessional Conduct Among U.S. Medical Students Linked to Burnout.
It focused on an article recently released in JAMA entitled, Relationship Between Burnout and Professional Conduct and Attitudes Among US Medical Students.
I had the opportunity to be interviewed for this article and was featured on an inset within the article that shared a minority of my interview. …
Why medical students are burning out and lacking altruism
I was talking with a pre-med student recently. He had completed his very first medical school interview and was, understandably, excited. But he told me the interviewer had asked him what he thought would be the outcome of the current health-care reform measures.
I laughed to myself. After 17 years in practice, even I don’t know the outcome, though I have my suspicions. It seemed a loaded, almost unfair question. After …
Physicians the government wants to see
First, this piece is not a how-to guide for getting into medical school.
But I use this ploy for good, and not for evil. Through conversations with a number of non-medical colleagues, I’ve been forced to think a bit more about premedical and medical education. A letter from a reader (which is presented in a highly altered version below) made me decide to more thoroughly and …
Making the decision to go to medical school
I spend much time talking with medical students. It is part of my job, but more than that I like medical students.
What should be the goal of medical schools? I believe we have an obligation to help our students grow into great physicians. What philosophical principles should we use?
Perhaps the answer to success is Servant Leadership. As I learn more about this concept, I hope that have become a servant …
Using servant leadership to teach medical students
Many fellow medical students are eager to improve “the system.”
However, an overeager attitude offers both promise and peril — promise that budding physicians are inspired to improve the inner workings of their chosen field, peril in that our naiveté may simply clutter the very complexities we seek to improve.
How do we strike a balance between getting involved and getting in the way?
I found guidance in law professors Raustiala’s and Sprigman’s …
How medical students can improve our health system
In our clinical years, our medical school has instituted a program in which we do learning modules along with our in hospital experience and didactics.
I was happy to see a module on empathy for my second month of surgery. The last question to be answered in this module was: “Although the studies on empathy are very consistent other authors have indicated that medical students are really not losing cognitive empathy, …
Empathy cannot be simply turned on and off
We’ve started taking a course called the “Introduction to Social Medicine and Global Health” headed up by Paul Farmer and David Jones. This is a course that exposes us to a variety of issues related to the social determinants of illness and health with a different lecturer each week. Recently, we had Nicholas Christakis, this week we have Allan Brandt, and for the next few weeks we’ll have Michael Porter, …
Social medicine and global health should be pre-med requirement
by Anar Mikailov
By now it is common knowledge that primary care is an undesirable field for newly graduating medical students.
Additionally, many current primary care physicians are closing shop and either enter early retirement or seek non-clinical professions. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the 2010 Residency Match showed that 1,184 U.S. medical grads chose Family Medicine, less than half of the available positions …
Technology empowered direct pay primary care
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by Timothy Dempsey and Pamela Savitz
Last month, the National Football League inducted seven of its all-time great players into its Hall of Fame in a ceremony filled with nostalgia and memories of legendary careers long-finished.
While this was going on, there was another type of induction ceremony taking place around the country. Yet, these celebrations lacked recollections of past achievements by retired legends finally receiving …
The White Coat Ceremony and its effect on medical students
A rising second year medical student read some of my posts and wrote me a kind note asking if I would write something for students. I taught students and ran surgical clerkships at community teaching hospitals for my entire career until about 19 months ago.
I also was prompted to address this subject after reading a recent New York Times story about a new admissions policy at Mt. Sinai …
Advice for a second year medical student
The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog carries an interesting piece about a program at Indiana University–Northwest that allows volunteers from the general public to participate in preparing cadavers for first year medical students.
This is a brilliant idea for several reasons:
Should the public participate in preparing cadavers for students?
There’s been considerable buzz on the web recently – on the New York Times website, on Facebook, and on a physicians’ forum called Sermo, at least – over a New York Times article recently entitled, “Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences.”
The article describes the Humanities and Medicine Program at Mount Sinai Medical School, a program which each year admits into the medical school 35 undergraduates who major …
Should humanities be the focus of prospective medical students?
You may be wondering why Stanford Medical School’s new genetic interpretation class – the one that offers medical students the opportunity to study their own genes – has made the news. After all, what better genes are there to study than your own? And if you were a medical student, wouldn’t you want to have your medical school subsidize 80% of an $800 test as part of your curriculum – …
We’re not ready for do it yourself genetic analysis
by James Gaulte, MD
Should medical student applicants be chosen less for their demonstrated ability to master large amounts of knowledge and solve problems and more for their social consciousness and desire to push forward with social justice?
That appears to be the suggestion of a panel of experts from the AMA in a project called the Initiative to Transform Medicine (ITM) who believe an …
Should social justice matter when choosing medical students?
Even as a medical student, I’m already complicit in exacerbating the problem of the high cost of health care.
It hit me one day, during my medicine rotation. We were working up a patient, and I was ordering tests with my resident. The patient had liver disease and perhaps some ascites.
He came in for another issue, and this wasn’t of primary concern to us, and we really wouldn’t have …
How a medical student can exacerbate the high cost of health care
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