A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
by J. James Rohack, MD
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the landmark Flexner Report that standardized medical education in North America. Now, during this historic time of health system change, medical education reforms on the scale of those enacted a century ago are needed …
AMA: Ensuring medical education best prepares future physicians
I thought I was an oddball in college. I’ve only recently learned that I was avant garde.
Right before beginning college in 1975, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Being the first-born son – with decent SATs – of an upwardly mobile Long Island Jewish family, I had relatively little choice in the matter. Notwithstanding this predestiny, I felt confident that medicine was a good fit for my interests …
Social science requirements for pre-medical students
Some reflections on my first semester of medical school.
1. Medical school is hard. Yes, it’s true — medical school is as hard as people who have been through it make it out to be.
I was skeptical when I started mostly because I felt I had challenged myself while doing my undergrad degree and in graduate school. I had taken heavy loads …
Medical school is hard, and other medical student thoughts
by Timothy Dempsey
One thing changes everything.
While this may be a poor paraphrase of the cheesy slogan ESPN used for the recently finished World Cup, in my life this statement has revealed itself as a universal truth. For me, one book changed everything. It would lead me into research labs, on a trip to disease-riddled Gaborone, Botswana, and pique my interest into an epidemic whose global …
Fighting AIDS compelled this student to become a doctor
by John Gever
Academic medical centers need comprehensive policies to manage their physicians’ relationships with industry and other commercial interests, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
Disclosure of such relationships — both to patients and to their institutions — should be more detailed than is currently the case at many medical schools, an AAMC task force recommended in a new report.
In particular, significant potential conflicts should be reported annually …
Academic medical centers need better conflict of interest policies
For at least the last 20 years, graduates of U.S. medical schools have resisted pleas from organized and disorganized medicine to become primary care physicians (PCPs). Since there is already a severe shortage of PCPs, pundits are wondering who is going to take care of the hordes of newly insured by 2014. Many have speculated about the possible reasons for this dilemma such as the relatively paltry earning potential of …
Create a family practice mystique in medical school
As originally reported in a New York Times article recently, with more coverage in MedPage Today, the University of Michigan School of Medicine has decided to end all industry support of CME as of January 1, 2011.
According to the dean of the medical school, “the decision was based on a review of literature about the influence on clinical faculty of industry-funded CME.” Apparently the decision was made after a …
How essential is industry funding for university CME?
by Shawn Vuong
Incoming medical students, I know you’re excited about medical school. I was in your same exact position about 2 years ago to the day. Every day I went to sleep and thought about how cool medical school was going to be, how much cool stuff I was going to learn, and how much my life was going to change.
I asked myself many questions. Am I going …
New medical student summer tips
At a recent meeting I attended, a vigorous discussion broke out about what medical students, residents and attendings should wear, and more importantly what they should not wear.
Interestingly, patients have been asked to weigh in on this discussion. What to wear is also on the mind of many current second year medical students who may find themselves trying to take study breaks from USMLE 1 to go buy …
What residents and medical students should wear in the hospital
Reams have been written on how medical students ought to select their field of medicine.
There are even personality-type tests that ask questions about what kinds of situations you like, how you react to problems, and your working style that purport to predict for which specialty you are suited. (I came up as an oncologist or a nephrologist.)
Others have opined that once you crunch the lifetime salary numbers, and then compare …
Choose primary care and follow your heart, not your brain
On a recent Saturday, I rounded in the hospital. I met up with Zainab, the president of the minority premed association for the University of Chicago, who asked to shadow me. While she was doing research at the hospital, she had not ever rounded in the hospital before. It was Saturday so our team was mostly off so it was just me and my very capable resident who is about …
Tips for students who want to shadow doctors
I received a wonderful inquisitive e-mail from a 1st year medical student. He aspires to an academic internal medicine career and, as a non-traditional student with an MPH, has realistic goals. He asks:
What scares me is the prospect of going into a relatively low-paying specialty in such a non-lucrative practice environment with such massive educational debt. Are there any other challenges to going into internal medicine that are unique to …
Academic internal medicine as a physician career choice
by an anonymous medical student
As of today, I am one month from adding those long sought-after and hard-earned initials to my name, M.D. I matched at my number one choice in a very competitive “lifestyle specialty,” have a fabulous husband who has helped me through the emotional turmoil that is medical school, and two young boys who make me laugh and smile every day. I sit here, where …
A medical student chooses dermatology because of family
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I try to read as much as I can of everything floating around the medical blogosphere. I think the most recurrent topic I come across is why current medical students aren’t choosing to go into primary care.
It’s a great topic that relates to health care reform, making it ripe for medical bloggers to comment on relentlessly. Probably the most often cited reason is low reimbursement for primary care (read: primary …
Why primary care doesn’t appeal to this medical student
I went to medical school and know something about what it’s like to work in clinical environments.
I’ve recently started reading blogs and articles about “physician burnout” and I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of blame being placed on “the system”. Doesn’t this kind of storytelling just reinforce that physicians are victims? I’d like to see physicians adopt a way of thinking that will enable them to create …
Burnout is common to teaching violin and practicing medicine
A letter from a pre-medical student honoring her gross anatomy cadaver.
Letter to the other side
by Hana Low
Thank you for donating your body to science and medical education. It’s so generous to give yourself to those you will never meet. I hope you’re having a good time, up there or wherever you are.
Working with your body has made me acutely conscious of the dangers in my everyday environment. I have to …
A pre-medical student writes to her gross anatomy cadaver
My husband and I recently traveled to Wuhan Medical School in the Hubei Province in central China.
Our medical school has partnered with Wuhan to help inform their curricular reform efforts. We spent 4 days touring the hospitals and teaching facilities, meeting students and faculty, going on rounds, and giving talks. Although the language barrier was challenging, we had incredible translators who worked to translate every slide we spoke …
China medical school and residency training
by Crystal Phend
Physicians don’t know much more about complementary and alternative medicine than their patients do, according to a new survey.
Most healthcare professionals who answered an online survey of Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin subscribers said their profession was just as poorly informed about herbal medicines (75.5%) as the general public (86.3%).
And almost half of respondents rated their own knowledge about herbal medicines as “quite” or “very” poor (36.2% and 10.4%, …
Alternative medicine isn’t taught to doctors in medical school
Ten years after the release of the IOM report To Err is Human, which documented the toll taken by medical errors in this country, the question remains: What can be done to reverse the trend of ever-increasing morbidity and mortality due to medical errors?
Last December, a look back over the decade since the release of To Err is Human — and a steady medical error death rate of about …
Teaching patient safety starts in medical school
The following is part of a series of original guest columns by the American College of Physicians.
by Steven Weinberger, MD, FACP
The New England Journal of Medicine‘s March 11 issue included an interesting “Clinical Decisions” article. Looking at a hypothetical case of an endocrinologist with time-unlimited board certification, the editors posed the question of whether he should voluntarily …
ACP: To whom are physicians accountable?
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