Medical Studies

How to reform Med School

Is the current medical school curriculum optimal in terms of teaching doctors-to-be how to best practice medicine? DB’s Medical Rants blog says no.

One cannot really understand most diseases if one cannot correlate the physiology. We should focus our anatomy teaching on the big issues, not the 3rd branch off the 2nd artery (hopefully you get my point.) We need not have students be able to identify dried out cadaver structures. Rather we should learn functional anatomy – e.g., the structures and causes of shoulder pain, the types of knee injuries, the correlation of DVT with clinical findings, intra-abdominal anatomy, how specific brain lesions impact patients.

To support these 2 very important courses we need to learn enough cell biology and histology to understand the cellular components of disease. We also need to know enough biochemistry to support the physiology course.

Sounds like good advice to me.