Admittedly, I haven't been to PT school yet, however I will say this: my issue is still not with the educational quality or clinical preparedness concerns but with the personal interest in seeing in detail, for real, what the human body actually looks like. For me it's kind of like going to the Grand Canyon - trust me on this one if you haven't been there - pictures don't do it even close to justice. Seeing something like that personally, in real life, gives you a much greater appreciation of it.
I don't doubt that students can learn the body parts just as effectively for less money using virtual anatomy, however I find that to be a moot point. Why do I give two craps if it's cheaper? Physical therapy school tuition has not gone down even one time in my life (and probably not in the lifetime of anyone on this board), has now reached utterly exorbitant rates, and will continue to go nowhere but up (at many times the rate of inflation) regardless of whether virtual anatomy is used or not. If you think any of the cost savings from switching to virtual anatomy will filter down to become money in the pockets of students, you've got another thing comin' in life.
Even if lab fees were reduced as a result of no longer buying cadavers, schools would just hike tuition and other fees to make up for it. If you don't think so, welcome to the real world. Thousands of students wishing to be physical therapists ship off to private schools to be had financially for three years, and just grin and bear it because they have no other option. No amount of cadaver buying or lack thereof is going to change that a bit. In fact, schools no longer buying cadavers just means that we are being had even worse. The world of higher education is not primarily about what's best for the student. The world of higher education, sad as it may seem, is about money.
I don't see the time required for dissection as a huge issue either. You're already at school all day, every day for two more years, why not spend that time doing something more hands-on and interesting than spending it looking at a computer screen like we modern people spend most of our time doing anyway?
If we assume that students learn better using dissections, then in order to justify a switch to virtual anatomy (from the perspective of a paying student) we must also take it to be true that the time saved by not dissecting will be used in such a way as to confer a greater clinical preparedness and educational benefit to the student than doing dissections and cadaveric anatomy studies would have. If we assume that students really are better prepared for clinical practice using virtual anatomy rather than real human bodies (which I'm confident is an assumption that would ring true in the minds of only very few patients and healthcare practitioners), then we still ought to require that the money saved will become a decrease in the total cost of attendance, and that the time saved will be used to further benefit the student. If we assume that neither method is even a bit better than the other at educating future professionals as a whole, which seems unlikely, once again the cost of school must go down proportionally.
I'm not too concerned with what's been found in this or that low-end journal article found on a Google search, whatever the findings may be.No matter how well a study is planned, such social science-esque research always has the potential to be susceptible to either finding what it wants to find or to finding a connection that isn't there to make the study worth something. I'm concerned with reality, and my reality is that if I'm going to spend several years of my life and several tens-of-thousands of dollars (or several hundreds of thousands for other professions) earning a doctorate degree and becoming a healthcare professional, I find examining the structure of the human body, which I will be in the business of healing for 40+ years, up close and personal, to be utterly appropriate and in fact necessary. It's bad enough to have physical therapists practicing who have never actually looked at and examined with their own eyes and hands the internal structures they are treating - I can't even believe people are able to become Doctors of Medicine without having thoroughly done so.
I'm sure students who have been through physical therapy school will differ widely as to how well they enjoyed (or how much they didn't enjoy) dissection lab. Those who found it to be distasteful for whatever reason will argue against it, and that is fair enough. Those who enjoyed it and found it beneficial will probably argue for it, which is fair enough too. Not all will see it my way or anyone elses' way, and that's just fine. I personally feel that if I'm going to practice a profession that is centered on understanding human anatomy and educating others about the same, it would be important for me to have learned human anatomy in the way it was discovered in the first place.
, not including most of my undergrad loans
