The Next Generation of Doctoring (original) (raw)

“We Came to Talk with the People Behind the Disease:” Communication and Control in Medical Education

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2006

To explore the ways in which biomedical culture responds to the new curricular addition of communication skills training, we observed activities related to the communication skills training of a class of 70 first-year medical students in an Israeli medical school during 2002-3. In addition, focus groups were conducted with medical students (n = 210) during 1998-2001. A gap was found between the rhetoric of ''patient-centered communication'' and ''empathy'' and the traditional concerns of medical authority, efficiency, and scientism. Communication skills and empathy training were appropriated into medical socialization by being reconstructed as clinical competence. Findings are further discussed in the context of medical professionalism, Israeli culture, service acting and service roles, and organizational learning.

Medical education and the healthcare system--why does the curriculum need to be reformed?

BMC medicine, 2014

Medical education has been the subject of ongoing debate since the early 1900s. The core of the discussion is about the importance of scientific knowledge on biological understanding at the expense of its social and humanistic characteristics. Unfortunately, reforms to the medical curriculum are still based on a biological vision of the health-illness process. In order to respond to the current needs of society, which is education's main objective, the learning processes of physicians and their instruction must change once again. The priority is the concept of the health-illness process that is primarily social and cultural, into which the biological and psychological aspects are inserted. A new curriculum has been developed that addresses a comprehensive instruction of the biological, psychological, social, and cultural (historical) aspects of medicine, with opportunities for students to acquire leadership, teamwork, and communication skills in order to introduce improvements i...

There's education, and then there's education in medicine

For some time now the field of medical education has been criticized by many of its stakeholders. Countless debates have been presented in the literature regarding the quality of medical education research, adequacy of methodological rigor, and other concerns. At present, the views expressed have largely come from physicians and persons with less familiarity with education science. As prolific educational researchers with PhDs in Education and Psychology, we offer a critique of medical education's apparent identity crisis and address what we believe are some of the most significant problems continuing to impede the field of medical education from catching up with the broader field of education. We close with specific recommendations for improving the overall state of medical education.