Sick of your school's emphasis?

[LanceFrench]

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[hildaluc]

Yep. I know we all have to follow "the mission" but this is getting old. I could be reading, making review sheets, napping, etc, but I am looking at a powerpoint of cow-milking technology. Frustrating!

 

[Church]

I'm tired of hearing all the new-agey pc progressivist bullsh** that they foist on us in our "essentials of clinical medicine" class. "Join with the patient"... ""The pt and the doctor both bring their lifeworlds together at the instant of the encounter"...

What a load of s***. I love people, I love to talk with pts, but the stupid crap the ECM faculty push is driving me up the wall. To them I say: Welcome to south Georgia. Farmers/campesinos and the like don't come to "join" with their doctor, and wouldn't give 2 cents to encounter your lifeworld. They take time off from work to see the doctor to find out what's broke, and get it fixed.

I swear. There should be a minimum requirement for these people to work at least 3 or 4 years in the real world before going to faculty.

 

[DoctorFunk]

Yep. I know we all have to follow "the mission" but this is getting old. I could be reading, making review sheets, napping, etc, but I am looking at a powerpoint of cow-milking technology. Frustrating!

Just be glad you're not going to have to learn the pathway of cow milking when you start reading High Yield Farming for the Step 1!

 

[Church]

Just be glad you're not going to have to learn the pathway of cow milking when you start reading High Yield Farming for the Step 1!

Better that than the disimpacting the bull technique 😱


ps- which is, btw, one of those courses that sounds cool in lecture, but is a MOTHER when you gotta do the practical

 

[Kimmer]

Re: Church
Exactly! At my school the dean for 1st and 2nd year not only has no real life experience - she only has a BS in Sociology and extensive cheerleading experience (God's honnest truth!!!!). I have decided putting her in that position is a message the school is sending to 1st and 2nd year students, "You do not matter, we have nothing but contempt for you and your petty concerns". The speeches she gave us 1st and 2nd year ... the pain, oh the pain...

 

[SwineLake98]

I'm tired of hearing all the new-agey pc progressivist bullsh** that they foist on us in our "essentials of clinical medicine" class. "Join with the patient"... ""The pt and the doctor both bring their lifeworlds together at the instant of the encounter"...

What a load of s***. I love people, I love to talk with pts, but the stupid crap the ECM faculty push is driving me up the wall.

Sounds like my "Clinical Practice of Medicine" class.
We have lectures on things like "cultural awareness" and how to act like you and the patient are a "team" solving a problem...the good part about the class is we've all been assigned to preceptors (aka - community physicians) and observe/take patient histories and eventually start taking vitals and such.
Still, the lecture is a joke, and what's worse is we have a "clinical skills" and written mid term the monday and wednesday after the first anatomy test (at least it's after, but needless to say, there won't be much prep until the weekend before)!

 

[NonTradMed]

We have to take a course that eats up four hours of our life a week, and then write one page papers on the class' current objectives. It's stupid because we spent four hours pretending to be a doctor and diagnosing a patient. We're first year students yet we'll suppose to know what tests to prescribe for our patients?! We have another class that's three hours of discussion of life cycles and such, which isn't too bad since some of the material will be covered on the boards, but the problem is that we don't get three hours worth of stuff out of the time spent. Discussions are great if we can get more stuff out of it. As it stands, it just eats away precious studying time for us.

 

[Ashers]

My school emphasizes "professionalism." We've got Touchy Feely BS Tuesdays; they include Psych lecture and interviewing a patient at an off campus hospital or clinic (fine, I'll deal with it, it's necessary, and actually getting to be interesting since I've done my interview😀) and Med Ethics lecture and small group.

Med ethics lecture and small group are a rehash of the exact same thing for 3 hours. You'd think we could have lecture and go home, but no, we have to go up to our little rooms, mess up the tables to sit around and have discussions with a doctor and lawyer, then put the tables back in the original fashion for fear of losing points from our grade. If we don't put the tables back, it's not professional, and therefore, they'd deduct points. Of course, they didn't tell us the first 2 weeks of class how they wanted the tables arranged, and they made announcement at how disappointed they were in us; and they were gracious by "resetting" the counts for those rooms which had two infringements for not rearranging the rooms.

I hate Tuesdays. I'd rather have a day of micro and path lectures and fall even more behind than fall asleep in med ethics.

 

[sscooterguy]

Yeah, every school has these preclinical clinical medicine classes. They definately do suck for the most part. I could never see why we needed them because I thought most of the stuff was really basic and self explanatory...until I met some horrible doctors and been on some really bad teams.
I realized that they are punishing everyone for the bad few. There are the 4-5 total jerks in the class that could learn a thing or two about the patient doctor relationship. Unfortunately, everyone suffers because you are all required to go through the classes, and the jerks that should actually pay attention skip the class. Oh well I guess.

sscooterguy

 

[Doctor Bagel]

Maybe I'm clueless, but I don't think my school has an emphasis aside from training doctors for our state, but even that's not shoved down your throat. Sure, we have human behavior and clinical medicine classes where they tell us not to be jerks and to listen to our patients, but I don't think that counts as a specific school emphasis since every school has that.

I would think a school emphasis would be more like schools that try to push people into primary care or rural practice. Our other state school does have that emphasis, which could maybe get old if you're not into that.

 

[Doctor Bagel]

My school emphasizes "professionalism." We've got Touchy Feely BS Tuesdays; they include Psych lecture and interviewing a patient at an off campus hospital or clinic (fine, I'll deal with it, it's necessary, and actually getting to be interesting since I've done my interview😀) and Med Ethics lecture and small group.

Med ethics lecture and small group are a rehash of the exact same thing for 3 hours. You'd think we could have lecture and go home, but no, we have to go up to our little rooms, mess up the tables to sit around and have discussions with a doctor and lawyer, then put the tables back in the original fashion for fear of losing points from our grade. If we don't put the tables back, it's not professional, and therefore, they'd deduct points. Of course, they didn't tell us the first 2 weeks of class how they wanted the tables arranged, and they made announcement at how disappointed they were in us; and they were gracious by "resetting" the counts for those rooms which had two infringements for not rearranging the rooms.

I hate Tuesdays. I'd rather have a day of micro and path lectures and fall even more behind than fall asleep in med ethics.

See, this is what makes me suspicious when schools talk a lot about "professionalism." It seems like they forget that profesionalism is a two-way street where all parties are expected to be respectful and courteous. From what I've seen, schools use the term "professionalism" to treat students like children.

 

[Wizard of Oz]

Yes about five to ten years ago, a push was made to integrate more clinical interaction into the first two years. It was more of a recruiting strategy than anything else. Then came this wave to move toward integrated learning or whatever your place calls it (problem-based, inquiry-based, evidence-based, etc.). Some places have drastically changed their curricula. In the lower-tier schools, however, a significant portion of the faculty have no vested interest in teaching or even making sure the students get the material that they will need for step 1. Of course the other problem is that the USMLE didn't really get any more clinically based, so a lot of the changes were useless as far as improving board schools were concerned.

As for emphasis, family and internal medicine will have their fingers in the first 3 years to a large extent. All of rural USA needs primary care, and all medical schools need research to make money. I don't really know what other emphasis the OP might be talking about. I think that everybody in medical school knows what the popular specialties are and why. As far as the allopathic schools go, students will file into a typical bell curve per specialty which will be skewed toward or away from the competative ones depending on the prestige of the school (check out how many Harvard grads do family med). They can encourage one thing or another, but once students actually rotate through the specialties, the effect of the cheerleading is nil.

I'm not a big fan of the BS in the first two years. Surely there is a medical school out there that doesn't sugar coat like this. Just give me a giant text that includes everything I need to know for my exams in years one and two. I'll memorize it for you, then you can teach me how to be a doctor later. Let's be real--isn't that really how you succeed on step 1 and get what you want? Everybody preaches that the only thing you can do to improve your standing is to spend the first two years memorizing.