Posted on 09/02/2010 10:10:14 AM PDT by reaganaut1
...
More than a year in the making, the N.Y.U. [medical school] curriculum makes connections, professors say, between the relatively abstract science being taught in the classroom and the way it plays out in real life. It brings the progressive “hands-on” approach to education from kindergarten into higher education, said Dr. Steven B. Abramson, the medical school’s vice dean for education: instead of playing with blocks, the medical students are, with all due respect, learning to play well with patients.
By advancing some of the clinical component into the first two years, the new curriculum also gives students more time in their third and fourth years to study popular public health issues like nutrition and how diseases might affect people differently depending on race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. For a few ambitious students, Dr. Abramson said, the new curriculum might make it possible to earn both an M.D. and a master’s degree in public health or administration in four years instead of five.
In a similar effort to connect medical students with patients sooner, the new medical school at Florida International University will place second-year students in underserved neighborhoods beginning this fall. A team of medical, nursing, social work and perhaps even law students will be assigned to a family, with the goal of understanding how factors like poverty and other stresses may complicate medical care.
At Harvard, the traditional third-year hospital rotations have been revised to foster more personal relationships with patients and to give students a sense of the continuity of care. A dozen students have been paired with faculty members to see their regular patients over an extended period of time at Cambridge Health Alliance, a system of hospitals and clinics.
“The model is intended to mimic real practice,” said Dr. David A. Hirsh
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’ll be the first to agree. I’m sure you’ve heard of the trial program where the prerequisite “weeding classes” of basic sciences are waived to get a more “well-rounded” physician.
I don’t want a well-rounded physician. I want one who knows what he/she’s doing. I don’t want one versed in reiki who believes in the wonders of healing touch or homeopathy. Give me a nerd who knows his chemistry.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these “progressive” methods are similar to the way Soviet physicians were trained...
As baby boomer docs retire (many earlier than planned due to BaraqqiCare) the govt solution will be to have an influx of foreign physicians. Communicating in English may be the biggest challenge.
you don't dare change the standards because you might not get paid...
I see less individualistic care and more academic care....as in " I KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR YOU" ....
This is mainly BS. My med school had us going in to meet and examine patients after the first six weeks and that was in 1982. Besides that the VAST majority of my classmates already had clinical experience with patients in one form or another, I was an ER orderly, we had many nurses and EMT’s etc. It was almost a requirement to get INTO med school because of all the applicants.
I love those videos. As an ER doc I can tell you they were all done by folks who know the real deal....
Good point. Most of the med students I’ve known also had hospital experience.
Thank you for your heroic service, sir. I simply don’t know how you do it.
Fifty years from now, maybe sooner, historians will make statements like this during their lectures:
“They used to call them, ‘ER Doctors.’”
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