Oh, The Humanity
I just read this article on the MedPage site and it is eye-opening. It’s called:
How Will Tomorrow’s Medical Students Be Different?
— New skills before and during medical school may enhance diversity and development
Yup, they are getting rid of some “hard sciences” like calculus for things like sociology. It’s all about the humanities now. We have talked about this before on Authentic Medicine. Removing grades and MCATS is the next step. I just wanted to show you some examples of how crazy things have gotten:
The AAMC has also created an optional exam to evaluate the “situational judgment” of students applying to medical school. The Professional Readiness Examopens in a new tab or window, formerly known as the AAMC Situational Judgment Test, consists of 30 hypothetical scenarios and 186 related questions that test the effectiveness of students’ remedies to hypothetical situations encountered in the classroom and practice. The appropriateness of students’ responses is a proxy for their readiness to enter medical school, as determined across eight core competencies such as service orientation, cultural competence, and teamwork.
Typical dilemmas presented to students include: (1) how to deal with a classmate who violates patient privacy on social media; (2) how to ensure a patient’s cultural customs are respected in the event something unexpected occurs following surgery; (3) how to seek help when the stress of a clerkship in emergency medicine is beginning to affect sleep and judgment; (4) how to address a lecturer who is quick to dismiss multiple valid perspectives on a subject; and (5) how to deal with a classmate who has assumed a deceased immigrant was “undocumented,” or a person’s stomach pain was fabricated because they were homeless.
To be fair, I want a doctor who is more sociable and friendly. I think that is a good thing. But I also want a doctor who is smart and whose brain is filled with the information to figure things out. Lastly, I don’t care what games they play in finding the most “progressive” doctors, they will all be bitter and burned out in a few years of practice due to our broken healthcare system.
Implicit bias is a thing. A bad thing. So is anchoring. Can affect the quality of care given to a human being and is not something to be dismissed because one considers DEI an “obsession”. People are affected by this s**t, including those of us who have to work within a system that still discriminates and/or provides disparate care based in ignorance. Perfect example of accepting that nonsense when one is not personally affected is the eGFR. Totally based on one flawed study by one doc on Black people, but nevertheless still continuously used ubiquitously in U.S. medicine. That s**t takes a toll. So what better options exist to get physicians to treat people like people…w/o the biases? When they have no ability to self-reflect or self-condemn because they have no ability to recognize their own implicit bias? A better answer than DEI awaits…
I agree. These biases absolutely exist but there has to be a better way.
#$&* this… @&%@§ every bit of it. I saw all of this PC bullshit on full display at my nephew’s graduation this year, and it was nauseating. This isn’t medicine, it’s indoctrination, brought to us by the same sort of ABFM idiots who had us doing MOC “cultural competency” extortion models.
Medicine has become overtly hostile to honesty and intelligence, and no one actually bright enough to do it should consider it now.
Honestly, I don’t give a f*** if my doc is sociable or friendly. I’ll take smart every day.
After 30 years of practice, I have been looking forward to retirement. In 4-5 years it will happen. The good news is that as a PHYSICIAN, I will finally get to escape the nightmare that the practice of medicine has become. The REALLY bad news is, I will then enter that same system as a PATIENT.
And you will. Having been on the other side of the equation I can tell you it’s a jungle out here. I have had some pretty sorry doctors. But also some very good ones, for which I am grateful