Medical schools are taking one step forward and three steps back in educating future doctors.
Mayo Medical School announced in late February their collaboration with Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to give doctors the upper hand when distributing medical information.
Students in the Mayo-Cronkite Fellowship will complete a one-year master’s program at Arizona State University’s journalism school, after their second year of medical school.
According to Arizona State University’s news Web site, the dual-degree program is part of Mayo’s interdisciplinary approach to medical education.
Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan said, in ASU’s news “Mayo medical students to study at Cronkite School,” that the program would create physicians who will “have the ability to tell important, complex and nuanced medical stories to wide audiences on any platform — print, broadcast or online.”
Although this approach will probably prove to be efficient, it sounds as if medical schools are creating solutions to the real problem in a roundabout way.
Deborah Helitzer, assistant dean for research education at the School of Medicine and principal investigator in the study, said medical students aren’t given the skills necessary to be sufficiently good at their job.
Helitzer told the Daily Lobo in “Three-year study analyzes women teaching medicine,” that one reason women don’t stay in academic medicine is because of this.
Students aren’t educated on completing research, teaching and receiving clinical service experience. But doctors must show excellence in two of these three categories and be competent in the third to be promoted in their field.
“You don’t just get up and give a PowerPoint,” she said. “Teaching is more involved than that, so I think that’s part of the problem. We’re not taught how to develop a syllabus. We’re not taught how to think about what we want students to learn and how to achieve that.”
She said on top of this students are also not taught how to balance work with their personal lives and at the same time continuing to be successful in the workplace.
Because really what’s the point of working for an employer, if you don’t slowly move your way up the ranks? To some employers this might even be grounds for termination, if you’re not going to excel at your position. They might think you don’t care or you’re not trying. Besides, whoever received a raise or higher position by simply being complacent in their position?
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Male medical students also have the same problems, but solve them by being more assertive about problems than their female peers.
Maybe the solution here isn’t making a medical school’s curriculum require tacking on additional degrees, such as the Mayo Medical School, in the path of becoming a doctor.
Medical students are already going to be in school for eight years, before they can even practice medicine. Do they really need an additional year to complete another degree before they can practice? Instead of making the path to become a doctor longer, medical school should be taught with a more practical method.
Students should be assigned to complete research in one particular area under a mentor. After a student finishes their research, the mentor can teach them how to write research papers for medical journals. (Journalists usually write stories for the mass media from these journal articles anyways. Rarely do newspapers allow submissions to be published in a News or Health section other than the Opinion section, unless they are employees.)
Students can then be assigned to become a teacher’s assistant to learn the ropes on how to teach others relevant and up to date medical information. This entire process could take at least a year to complete and could be done simultaneously with clinical experience through patient one-on-one contact.
If medical schools only amped up their curriculum to include all of these additional things, students would have a sense of what they are supposed to be doing. Students should be taught in medical school, not only about the human anatomy and physiology and pharmacology, but how to teach, research and receive clinical service experience.
The curriculum currently in place sounds as if it achieves its goal in giving students the knowledge they need, but at the same time sets the students up for failure.
What’s the point of medical school if students drop out, because they are in a sense moving through their careers with blindfolds on, as they try to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing? What is the point of students spending the time and money if they aren’t even given the tools needed to do their job? Isn’t that what medical school is supposed to be doing?
The community looks towards doctors for answers about health and for new medical discoveries. They should be given the proper education, which describes in detail how doctors should be distributing medical information, but I guess adding on an additional degree to help students in educating the public is better than them not receiving any education at all.
