Monthly Archives: March 2013

To preface this hopeful-beginnings-of-an-outline, a disclaimer: this paper/project is going to be a doozy.

In a way, this is going to be a good thing. For instance, I believe I will have no problem whatsoever reaching the 6-8 page limit; if anything, I feel I may have to hold myself back.  In truth, once I started really delving into research regarding the future of health care and med ed, I realized just how much is out there.  This issue is complex, at its simplest.  It is touched my politics, business, finances, and personal sacrifices.  Health care (and its physicians) are, at the same time, both improving and backtracking towards decline.  And, as my plethora of blog posts, articles, TEDtalks, etc. indicate, the world is talking about this.  A lot.

First, I’m actually going to start with my presentation of the problem, which is, in fact, tied to my personal ethos regarding the problem.  At first, I was concerned because I didn’t think that I, a freshman student in undergrad, had much to say about the future of physicians and education.  However, I realized just how pertinent the information presented in my argument and call for change is to my life; after all, I am a student contemplating health care as a career, and it looks like health care needs to be sold to my generation.  So first, some pessimism: medical professionals will continue to decline if they remain unhappy and regretful of the state of their career choice, and apparently misconceptions of the profession run rampant.  However, I am not quite sure how to incorporate this into the introduction.

Thesis: In order to repair a field paradoxically declining with its increasing demand and knowledge, a paradigm shift in which medical education embraces creativity and relevant cultural and technological progress is necessary to create an ideal health system comprised of financially-competent, empathic, and imaginative physicians.

Herein lies the layout of the rest of the essay.  Potential solutions to these problems.  I apologize; this is a rough layout, and I really am not quite sure how to organize it just yet.  But, these are the common themes I came across in my research that I definitely would like to incorporate somehow:

Reform starts with the rejection of conformation: When it comes to med school, the bullet points comprising the checklist of “Who You Have to Be to Get Into Medical School” leave very little wiggle room for individuality; with research, volunteering, stellar test scores/MCATS, and more, these cookie-cutter applicants lend very little diversity and creativity to the pool of medical students. Medical reform starts with applications process and the would-be students themselves.  So: we need to open up the realm of medicine to those who think differently, creatively, and unconventionally.  Medical school is not merely for the cut-and-dry life sciences kids.

Diversity with technology creates connectivity and innovation: With the incorporation of diverse angles of thought in medicine, we take ideas from biology, technology, math, etc. and bring them to their full potential with the support of the others.  Reality, including the reality of medicine, does not function within itself.  As stated earlier in this blog post, it is multi-faceted with politics, business, etc.; however, it is also multi-faceted in its innovation.  Medicine needs expertise of many disciplines of study beyond just biology, and these experts need to communicate with each other.  They need to share ideas – they need to learn from each other.  Medical school could/should be that vehicle.

Technology Opens up Unique Opportunities for Med/Med Ed: Here, we can bring together these ideas for specific suggestions for med ed reform; for example, a call for creativity is also a call for sacrifice of something else.  This something else could very well take the form of previously-memorized minutia that could just-as-easily be accessed via technology.  This also brings up the suggestion of doing away with (some) of the force-feeding of large amounts of information via texbook, lecture, etc. in medical school in favor of more clinical and practical experiences early on, or perhaps more application/critical thinking/open-book-problem-solving medical school evaluation (aka tests and grades).

Similarly, this need of connectedness transfers over into the needs of patient care: There is a current, idealistic phenomenon garnering attention, and that is the call for Whole Patient Care.  WPC requires that, again, communication is essential for the patient. This is in terms of our increase in specialists (who need to talk to each other about the same patient), but also can apply to the role of compassion and empathy in doctor-patient relationships.

Guys, I’m stopping here.  But honestly, there could still be so much more. Do you see any holes? Any questions or sides of the issue that you would like me to address?

Additional Source Stuff:

http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=7331 , http://blog.tedmed.com/?p=2779 , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-ansary/future-medical-education_b_2699375.html , http://www.tomorrowsdoctor.org/visions , http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2013/03/08/what-my-home-renovation-taught-me-about-practicing-medicine/ , http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2013/03/02/not-in-my-name-real-patient-centeredness-means-sharing-power/

For my online deliberation assignment, I chose to deliberate on a health care blog.  The site was bursting with information, and I found that I very much enjoyed perusing through the multitude of articles about current, innovative medicine (this is probably a good thing considering I’m going after a career in health care, here).  Because the subject the subject holds so much interest and relevance to me (and also to the current public too – more on that later), I’m am, as Sarah put it during class, “going towards health care”.  The subject is vast, but it leaves me with many, many options.

Specifically, though, I’m thinking along the lines of the Affordable Care Act and its implications.  Herein lies the kairos of this issue – although I may be ever-so-slightly past its peak, interest in our nation’s health care system is still high.  Because we recently signed into law a drastic change, this means that in order for it to work, other changes need to take place as a type of “coevolution”, if you will. This could mean addressing the physician shortage, or perhaps I could even challenge the current medical school curriculum.  My audience would obviously change depending on what exactly I decide to focus on, but it would be easy to direct it any way.  Students, lawmakers, the American Medical Association, medical schools, etc.   Click.  Take a look at the homepage.  Clearly, the level of kairos is high – well, I guess, specifically 82%.

So, I suppose that in writing this blog post, I’m realizing that my two biggest contenders for my persuasive essay are, specifically, encouraging students to pursue a career in medicine (or some other way to address the physician shortage…although I’m not about to advocate medical robots), or encouraging medical schools/AMA to revamp Med. Ed. in a specific way.  However, I’m wondering if I should be concerned that I would be trying to persuade them to do something that they’re already in the process of doing.  But there has to be a way to work around that, right?

In order to reach this ultimate purpose – making people consider medical education in a new, nonconventional way – my “persuasive” research would include much about how medicine looks today as opposed to how it looked when traditional medical education was first established.  Specifically, this could refer to technology, increased number of people needing health care due to merely public health or population demographics, and also increased number of people with access to health care due to the Affordable Care Act.

And, perhaps for my advocacy project, I could submit my own proposal to the AMA  for what medical education should look like? You know, with all my experience in medical school and all. Yeah… just kidding.  Well, I mean, I’m not quite sure whether or not that would be possible.  However, I could somehow campaign Mt. Nittany health professionals to start/endorse a PSU student-physician shadowing program to encourage students to consider health care, or perhaps direct students and teachers themselves to push health care careers.  It’s weird – it’s almost there’s a stigma on freshmen coming in thinking they’re going to med school.  Sure, a lot of these plans do end up changing, but what if a fewer number of these plans if fellow students, TAs, and professors took them seriously when they come in making this claim?  Not sure of the details, but a viable advocacy project could include encouraging students and professors to encourage each other/help each other in this goal.