Time for a round up of some posts around gender and medical education. This list are posts about this subject all starting with a link to the original post. Gender and Medical Textbooks. Current medical textbooks do not consistently integrate gender-related aspects of coronary heart disease, depression and alcohol abuse, thereby omitting information. When it is available, information mainly applies to epidemiological data and reproduction. A Portrait of Depression in Mass Media, Gender Influences. This study not only shows that certain traditional gender norms still persist in mass media representation of men and women suffering from depression, it also challenges some of .....read more »

The educational opportunity in Virtual Worlds such as Second Life may not be a replacement for the doctor- or nurse-patient interaction or relationship, but they may serve as an adjunct or pre- or post-learning tool. Strengths of Virtual Worlds in Medical Education: In virtual worlds you can design and construct unique environments and then share them with others in a collaborative fashion. Learners actively build and interact in environments that promote creativity and social networking. Educators have to write specific learning goals for these virtual world simulations. Virtual world is available 24/7 there is an anytime/anywhere benefit for distance education students. Healthcare consumers have the .....read more »

A recent study published in Medical Education demonstrated that undergraduate medical students react less positively towards mentally ill patients in primary care than to patients in good health or with a chronic physical illness, such as diabetes. Despite striving to promote knowledge and skills related to the recognition and management of patients with mental illness by the General Medical Council (GMC) and UK medical schools. Moreover, general clinical and psychiatric training had little effect on these reactions. Concerns that the students appears to have with patients with mental illness ? Their perception that mental health patients will take up more time. This .....read more »

Current medical textbooks do not consistently integrate gender-related aspects of coronary heart disease, depression and alcohol abuse, thereby omitting information. When it is available, information mainly applies to epidemiological data and reproduction. This is not limited to text books but also applies to guidelines and medical curriculum. The authors selected medical textbooks recommended by at least two medical schools in the Netherlands in the academic years 2004–05 and 2005–06. The medical disciplines which they investigated were cardiology, internal medicine, pharmacology and psychiatry. They selected one major topic for cardiology: coronary heart disease and one for psychiatry: depression. They also focused on alcohol .....read more »

Why should emotional intelligence be important in medical education? It could develop a better understanding of the competency interpersonal and communications skills. Communications skills of a medical student are easier to define and observe than interpersonal skills. You can use a one way screen, and rating scales. Successful interaction needs more than communications skills and this is were interpersonal skills come in. Interpersonal skills is inherently relation and process oriented, it is all about relieving anxiety, [and] establishing trusting relationships. Emotional Intelligence is a set of 4 distinct yet related abilities: (1) perceiving emotions; (2) using emotions; (3) understanding emotions; and, (4) managing .....read more »

Internet based learning clearly has a substantial benefit on the knowledge of participants compared with no learning intervention. Higher interactivity, ongoing access to course material, online discussion, or the presence of practice exercise did not have a substantial influence on the benefit of Internet-based learning when compared with no intervention. The quality of the study did however. The better the study the lower the positive effect of the Internet-based learning. Internet-based learning compared with non-Internet instructional methods are heterogeneous and generally small, suggesting effectiveness similar to traditional methods. It was also not clear how variations in instructional design influenced the magnitude of .....read more »

If you want to know which doctor is the most trustworthy, ask the nurse. The nurse-rated patient doctor relationship (PDR) and the Emotional Intelligence (EI) score for the doctor were positively associated with patient trust at a significant level.A doctor’s self reported Emotional Intelligence did not correlate with patient-rated trust, or the patient rated quality of the Patient Doctor Relationship. This is the fourth post in this series about patient doctor relationship. Next Friday will be the next post. What is emotional intelligence and why is it important in the Patient Doctor Relationship?The first and original and still useful definition of .....read more »

No I don't think so. For several reasons. Empathy is a process with different steps. Especially feeling what the patients feels is a quality not every doctor has. And if they do it is not always appropriate nor possible to be sensitive enough to use it. Moreover this process not only needs the quality it is also costs energy, depends on the relationship with the patient, and needs experience. Along with their education medical students loose some of their humanistic attitudes such as empathy especially during their medical clerkship, often they become more cynical during their clinical training. Empathic feelings are .....read more »

Statistics on technology and educationThanks How to Split an Atom ..read more »

I wanted to be a psychiatrist before I went to Med School. Fascinated by the work of Jung and especially Freud, psychiatry seemed the ultimate goal for Med School. Encountered these pioneers while reading literature and a new goal was formulated. Before that my hart was set on social geography, thank god I changed my mind.Other factors such as the encounter with people out of the ordinary during my earlier years most certainly did help my career choice but I found out after finishing Med School during residency in psychiatry.During Med School I only once doubted my choice. It was .....read more »