good videotape for all premeds.

[youngjock]

I just saw a Nova videotape called <<making the doctors>>.

It followed several harvard med. students from their first day at harvard med. school till the end of their internship.

It is a very emotional videotape. And it is really a well done videotape, becoming a doctor is not as easy as someone may think.

check out your local libraries, they might have it.

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[mpp]

Similar to the NOVA episode (which is actually a 2-hour NOVA as compard with the usual 1-hour episodes) there is a very similar book entitled "White Coat" by Ellen Lerner Rothman. It is basically her account of getting into and attending Harvard Medical School. Kind of a touchy-feely book but helped me in realizing that lots of people probably have the same anxieties about studying medicine as I do.

Another interesting book I found (all in my local library together on the same shelf but there are dozens of others if you search Amazon or something similar) was "So You Want to be a Doctor" by Naomi Bluestone which has some humorous and enlightening essays on the decision to become a physician.

And while I'm on the doctor-book recommending trend, don't miss out on reading "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis for which he won the Pulitzer prize but turned it down. It tells the story of becoming a doctor and research scientist. It was written in the 1920s and so the "science" is a bit dated, but the themes of the book are timeless, not just for doctors but for anyone.

And I almost forgot, to get a nice taste of the life of an intern and to read some touching and funny stories, read "Intern" attributed to Doctor X. Again, a bit dated as it is from the 1960s, but it is a thorough day-to-day diary of a struggling first-year intern. Some really great narratives.

 

[youngjock]

the name should be <<MD: the making of a doctor>>

it seems to be a tough career.

among the four male students they followed the entire 7 years, 2 of them got divorced!

 

[Pikevillemedstudent]

In the intro of our Community and Behavioral medicine, we watched the two hour NOVA film. I am pretty sure all of us thought that the video was very amusing. I thought Harvard med students would act a little more intelligently. They actually said after they took the boards that they did not know how actin and myosin interacted!!! How did they get into Harvard? I knew that when I was in undergrad for heaven sake. Also, the guy who did EM in Michigan was insane. He kept talking about the importance of owning a gun. You would think that an EM doc, seeing gunshot wounds routinely, would not be so animated about gun ownership. Don't even get me started on his motorcycle and his motorcycle chick! Perhaps the movie started out on the wrong foot when one of the ladies featured in the film said that the cadavers were so "life-like". Don't get me wrong, this film has its good parts, but it also has some pretty hilarious parts.