Comrade said:
Some schools really advertise how their students 'see patients early' in their curriculums. What exactly is the benefit of that? Without having the educational foundation in place, what exactly can you do? We've all already shadowed physicians, and in clinical rotations there'll be plenty of patients to see. While being in the hospital is more fun than studying notes, does it really make a better physician to do that at the expense of studying human physiology as thoroughly?
At one interview I was told that I'd be seeing patients within the first few weeks. Turns out these 'patients' were actually standardized patient actors and not sick people. The purpose of this, ostensibly, to hone interviewing skills.
What's the big deal with seeing patients? I need to learn what can go wrong with them first!
Hi there,
During the first semester of my first year, we had clinical rotations. You could pick the specialty that you wanted to rotate through but there were set goals for the rotation. We were placed on the clinical team along with the more senior medical students, the interns and the resident. We were also very closely under the eye of an attending who carefully evaluated our learning experience.The first thing that you learn is to do a thorough patient history and present the patient to the attending mentor. This was golden knowledge.
You do not have to have an extensive clinical or educational background to do a great patient history. You have to have the ability to listen to what the patient is telling you and ask questions that get to the bottom of the patients problems.
Learning how to do a great patient presentation take practice. The more you do something, the better you are at doing it. Again, you do not need to have an extensive clincial background but you do need to know how to logically organize what the patient has told you into a concise presentation that gets to the meat of their problem. My attending carefully taught me how to analyze what the patient tells you and how to organize that information into a great history and presentation.
Anyone can sit and do a "check-off" kind of patient history but a good medical school education gives you the background over the course of four years) in how to evaluate the complaints of your patients. It's not about how good you are at procedures. It's not about how many surgeries you scrubbed, it is about how you can take all of the information (especially what you learn from the patient) and develop a clear clinical plan for treating them.
The earlier you are exposed to clinical medicine and the earlier you start to develop your clinical evaluation skills, the better. This is why there is no substitute for a physician. This is why there is no education that even comes close to a medical education and this is what you pay thousands of dollars in tuition to master. All of those physiological factoids are useless if you cannot walk into a room, take a thorough patient history and apply your knowledge of physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry etc. to solving their clinical problem.
I didn't fully appreciate how much that early clinical exposure was of benefit to me until I was an intern. There were other interns who had graduated from extremely high ranked schools who were just confounded when it came to actually seeing a patient and developing a clinical plan. I received very high evaluations for being able to do this efficiently.
A good question to ask on your medical school interviews is: "How early do students get clinical exposure and what is the nature of this exposure?" Just shadowing a physician is not the same thing.
njbmd
🙂
