Are medical schools squashing creativity? Part 2: Lighten up on mandates, and take advantage of the

[xchrom]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/05/25/are-medical-schools-squashing-creativity-part-2-lighten-up-on-mandates-and-take-advantage-of-the-informal-curriculum/

Are medical schools squashing creativity? Part 2: Lighten up on mandates, and take advantage of the “informal curriculum”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about creativity. With its emphasis on requirements and contrived benchmarks of success, medical school admissions might inadvertently be selecting for those who are skilled at jumping through hoops and weeding out more independent thinkers. I received comments from people who were so inspired that they wanted to discuss ideas about reforming the curriculum. Creativity is missing; how are we going to fix this? It was the epitome of irony to me: attempting to standardize the exact thing that refers to thinking outside standardization.

In this post, I hope to address my thinking about the subject in a bit more detail. I believe excessive curriculum mandates are a well-meaning but counterproductive approach to solving what we are aiming to solve.

The temptation to improve education through mandates is not new. Every few years, medical administrators, politicians, or some other Powers That Be decide an important quality that all doctors should have is not being taught, and that it must be standardized into medical education. Focus was first on mastery of the hard sciences, then turned to increased emphasis on compassion and communication. The latest has been a turn to the medical humanities, with endeavors such as visiting art museums and engaging in poetry-writing sessions becoming increasingly widespread. At the end of 2011, 69 of 133 accredited medical schools in the US required a course in the medical humanities.

Medicine is holistic – a blend of science and art – which those inclined to suggest reform rightly realize involves far more than repairing the human body when it malfunctions. The medical humanities, as a field of study, is invaluable. The question is: should it be required?

[kestrel91316]

1. I don't need my physician to be "creative" in a humanities sense.

I need her to be an expert in the working of the human body and mind and how to fix it when it's not working so well.

That said, my alma mater's college of vet med/biomed sci is going to start publishing a literary magazine. To which I have already submitted an essay. LOL

[cbayer]

2. I don't know about this at all.

We really need to be moving towards evidenced based protocols and away from the notion that any physician can do pretty much anything, whether there is evidence to back it up or not.

[Warpy]

3. I honestly don't care if a physician is all warm fuzzies

or has the bedside manner of an angry puff adder as long as s/he has the knowledge to be able to fix what ails me.

The problem with the puff adders is that they piss people off and are more likely to get sued if something goes awry.

[Celebration]

4. not every condition fits into the pharmaceutical box

But pharmaceutical companies shape medical school curriculum through donations. Because they have the most money and requirement for extensive clinical studies, (and by the way are not forced to publish any negative data and studies), so called "evidence based medicine" is skewed towards the use of expensive and side effects prone pharmaceutical drugs.

I'll take a "creative" doctor any day--one for example, that has heard of coenzyme Q10 and read the studies, one that has heard of inulin and read the studies, and one that takes the pharmaceutical company free samples freely, but takes their spiel with a grain of salt, and uses pharmaceutic drugs judiciously, and only when other measures fail.