What I Learned in Medical School


Book Description

A group of vivid, first-person stories of medical students who don't "fit the mold" and have had challenges completing conventional medical training.




Research Skills for Medical Students


Book Description

The revised Tomorrow′s Doctors makes it clear that doctors need to be aware of their responsibilities as scholars and scientists and it is therefore vital that students develop excellent research skills. Whilst there are many ′research skills′ books, medical students frequently struggle with understanding the difference between the practices of research, audit, service evaluation, systematic and narrative reviews and when and how to apply them. This book addresses the kinds of questions novice investigators always ask and helps students utilise study designs, data collection tools and analysis effectively.




Human


Book Description




How Doctors Think


Book Description

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.




When Doctors Become Patients


Book Description

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness-- not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick-- by Oliver Sacks among them-- and TV shows like "House" touch on the topic, never has there been a "systematic, integrated look" at what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill.The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be-- a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are important not just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine in America today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that point the way to a more humane future.




Health, Behaviour and Society: Clinical Medicine in Context


Book Description

There is more to a person than a particular symptom or disease: patients are individuals but they are not isolated, they are part of a family, a community, an environment, and all these factors can affect in many different ways how they manage health and illness. This book provides an introduction to population, sociological and psychological influences on health and delivery of healthcare in the UK and will equip today’s medical students with the knowledge required to be properly prepared for clinical practice in accordance with the outcomes of Tomorrow’s Doctors.




Today's Students, Tomorrow's Doctors


Book Description

This work includes forewords by Sir Kenneth Calman, Lynn Calman, and Rita Charon. Respectively Vice-Chancellor and Warden, University of Durham and former Chief Medical Officer for England; Research Associate, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester; Professor of Clinical Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons, University of Columbia, New York, USA. "Today's Students, Tomorrow's Doctors" offers actual accounts of life as a trainee junior doctor in the health service today. It is an intriguing read which includes student contributions that are witty, humorous, poignant and sometimes harrowing. With a strong focus on the personal, powerful and emotional experiences of trainee and junior doctors, this unique book challenges medical educators to understand the demands placed on graduates and will stimulate change and curriculum development. The book is also a great reference for medical students - preparing them for the realities of ward life. It aids in developing an understanding of the skills and experience required to survive and thrive in the healthcare environment. This is an invaluable resource for medical educators in both work-based and university roles. It will also be of great interest to healthcare managers and curriculum developers and shapers. 'A joy to read, full of hope. We were delighted, surprised and at times concerned. Delighted because of the issues raised and the sophisticated ways in which students responded to the challenges; surprised at the range of issues raised and the obvious importance of relationships in the clinical setting; finally concerned at some of the attitudes which were commented on, especially of senior staff, and on the adequacy of preparation for house officer posts. This book is inspirational and should be read by all who have any part to play in the education of doctors.' - Sir Kenneth Calman and Lynne Calman, in their Foreword. 'Extraordinary. This is autobiographical insight at its most powerful, for it leads to transformative growth and true learning. I am first of all impressed with the emotional valence of these writings. They reflect the students' interior states of sadness, empathy, and awe as they bear witness to patients' suffering. The essays reflect a fresh calculus of sickness and duty [and] give me great and glad hope that our doctors of the future will be efficient with the forms of medicine as well as courageous in braving their contact with the ill, with the dying, with the humans who confront them evermore seeking care, seeking comfort, seeking their full capacity to heal.' - Rita Charon, in her Foreword.




Is There a Doctor in the House?


Book Description

"Will there be a doctor--a good doctor--when I need one?" This is the bedrock health care concern for Americans, encompassing as it does additional concerns about affordability, accessibility, efficiency, and specialty expertise. Richard M. Scheffler brings an economist's insight to the question, showing how shifts in market power underlie the changes we have seen in the health workforce and how they will affect the future availability of doctors. Predicting the "right" ratio of doctors to population in the future is only a small piece of the puzzle, and one that has been the subject of much forecasting, and little agreement, over the past several decades. In this concise and readable analysis, Scheffler goes beyond the guessing game to demonstrate that today's health care system is the product of financial influences in both the policy realm and on the ground in the offices of medical centers, HMOs, insurers, and physicians throughout America. He shows how factors such as physician income, medical training costs, and new technologies affect the specialties and geographic distribution of doctors. Scheffler then brings these findings to bear on a set of predictions for the U.S. and international physician workforce that extend five and ten years into the future. As part of his vision of tomorrow's ideal workforce, he offers a template for enhancing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the health care system overall. In the groundbreaking second half of the book, the author, a health policy expert himself, tests his ideas in conversations with leading figures in health policy, medical education, health economics, and physician practice. Their unguarded give-and-take offers a window on the best thinking currently available anywhere. Finally, Scheffler combines their insights with his own to offer observations that will change the way health care's stakeholders should think about the future.




Searching for the Family Doctor


Book Description

With family doctors increasingly overburdened, bureaucratized, and burned out, how can the field change before it's too late? Over the past few decades, as American medical practice has become increasingly specialized, the number of generalists—doctors who care for the whole person—has plummeted. On paper, family medicine sounds noble; in practice, though, the field is so demanding in scope and substance, and the health system so favorable to specialists, that it cannot be fulfilled by most doctors. In Searching for the Family Doctor, Timothy J. Hoff weaves together the early history of the family practice specialty in the United States with the personal narratives of modern-day family doctors. By formalizing this area of practice and instituting specialist-level training requirements, the originators of family practice hoped to increase respect for generalists, improve the pipeline of young medical graduates choosing primary care, and, in so doing, have a major positive impact on the way patients receive care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty-five family doctors, Hoff shows us how these medical professionals have had their calling transformed not only by the indifferent acts of an unsupportive health care system but by the hand of their own medical specialty—a specialty that has chosen to pursue short- over long-term viability, conformity over uniqueness, and protectionism over collaboration. A specialty unable to innovate to keep its membership cohesive and focused on fulfilling the generalist ideal. The family doctor, Hoff explains, was conceived of as a powered-up version of the "country doctor" idea. At a time when doctor-patient relationships are evaporating in the face of highly transactional, fast-food-style medical practice, this ideal seems both nostalgic and revolutionary. However, the realities of highly bureaucratic reimbursement and quality-of-care requirements, educational debt, and ongoing consolidation of the old-fashioned independent doctor's office into corporate health systems have stacked the deck against the altruists and true believers who are drawn to the profession of family practice. As more family doctors wind up working for big health care corporations, their career paths grow more parochial, balkanizing the specialty. Their work roles and professional identities are increasingly niche-oriented. Exploring how to save primary care by giving family doctors a fighting chance to become the generalists we need in our lives, Searching for the Family Doctor is required reading for anyone interested in the troubled state of modern medicine.