Some classmates were talking about this program yesterday over our advisory dean lunch. It is a TV documentary that follows seven Harvard medical students from their first day of medical school in ~1985 and then looks at where they are now. You can watch six minute clips of the show but I warn you that you can't watch just one… I highly recommend the program.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/program.html
I watched it last night as I finished up some work for today. I think I watched it out of curiosity. I wanted to know what medical school was like in the eighties. Was it any different? Was it any better? I think I was just curious to learn what this medical school experience meant to others with the hope that that would tell me what this experience meant to me.
I am sure I will spend the rest of my time here at Rochester trying to figure out what it is this experience means to me. These are not questions like, what am I doing here? Is this the right place for me? These are questions like, what does it mean that I spend all of my days looking at or talking about illness/health? Will the next five minutes of what the lecturer says affect a patient's health at any point in my future career? Will the feeling of not knowing enough go away tomorrow? Do I "work"? Am I asking the patient this for her sake? For mine? Where is my place in society? What is a medical student?
Dr. E shed a little light on the answer to that today. This afternoon, half of our class went to their respective clinics and the other half stayed at school to learn about the knee and ankle exam. I and eight of my classmates spent the afternoon with Dr. E, a world renowned orthopedic S. He spent the earlier half of the week with the Cornell Law faculty and students. According to him, law school doesn't really make the student think; he followed that with an equally presumptuous claim that he got the feeling that medical students are smarter than law students.
Just to clear his name (for all lawyers in the audience), Dr. E is a genuinely good man, a really caring doctor. He belongs to the old class of physicians who should have retired twenty years ago but they can't hang it up. They love to teach, they love patients, they love students. I am so lucky to have so many professors like this. Unfortunately, their passion for medicine can lead them to say things that aren't true.
4 comments:
I love the reference in the title.
What I hear is that it is harder to get into med school than law school, but once everyone is all admitted, law students work harder than med students. They say this is because you have to graduate in the top 10 percent in law school (unless you went to a big name school) to get a good job. That could be true.
Here's some of my questions - does medical school really make students think? Am I learning here? Am I becoming something yet? How much will this change me?
Petra: So glad. It was a toss up between that and the beautiful wife line, or both to make sure people got it.
Angel: I wanted to address those very same questions in response to Dr. E's statements but I figured I can only expect people to read so much in a blog entry. short answers, med school does make you think but it is very little when weighed against the volume of memorization. The last question is answered in the second episode of Doctor Diaries :)
I would like to have something articulate to say in response to this post, but somewhere in the last three years, I lost my capacity to think.
(Also, Dr. E. Was he cute? A cute old man? That can make up for a multitude of sins/awkwardisms.)
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