This animation film was submitted by a med student to YouTube for the instructor of a course about ‘Narratives of Ageing:Exploring Creative Approaches to Dementia Care’. Students visited a locked unit at a care facility for people with Alzheimer's disease. They used YouTube to watch streamed video made by Alzheimer's disease advocacy groups, twitter was used for real time communication between med students and instructors, Skype was used to interact with and talk to various experts. The instructors took and uploaded pictures to Flickr of students and residents interacting. Several students used these pictures for a creative final project which .....read more »

As the authors state: a lot of energy and time is allocated during medical education on technical procedures and neurbiological explanatory theories. Empathy and professionalism some of the important qualities of a good doctor also according to the CanMEDS framework are threatened to be "up-regulated through education" comparable to serotonergic receptors in the limbic system. Before medical students undergo a neurobiological training for professionalism medical humanities could help in the evaluation of the patients' personal experience of the disease and therapy. Moreover, research shows a decline in empathy during medical education and residents' training. focus should form the core of a good .....read more »

Recently discovered a new nice blog: Pre-Med Hell. It started in January 2010. One of their first posts was Must Read Books for Pre-Med Students, which was my first acquitance with this blog. Liked their suggestions, more original than The House of God although this book also got a favorable review on this blog. Even bought one of their suggestions: How Doctors Think. Go and have a look at their reviews of books and other posts for pre-med students. If you have some more suggestions for must reads for med students or residents especially psychiatric residents, please let me know .....read more »

It's not often an author of a publication discussed on this blogs delivers a comment. You can also read the comment in this recent blog post here: Beyond Bullet Points in Medical Education. As mentioned in my blog post it's probably not only the design of the slides but mostly the educational instructions such as building on the knowledge the students already have and encourage the students to prepare for the lecture. This will enable the lecture to focus more on new things they should learn. All these arguments are all more or less good educational practice. Moreover, from my .....read more »

Found an interesting article on the use of e-readers in medical education, the Kindle. The Kindle was used by medical students during family medicine clerkship and by family medicine clerkship preceptors. The e-reader was loaded with medical textbooks and other relevant material such as guidelines. The hypotheses was that the information demand during education and working in a clinical setting would favor the use of e-readers. After usage of the devices the students and preceptors were send a link to an online anonymous survey asking them to rate the use of the e-reader in terms of relevance of content, usability, .....read more »

Readers from this blog recognize my interest in presentation skills. Not only the presenting but also the design of slides. Often I've written about the boring powerpoint slides often used in lectures with endless bullet points and great deal of text. Several authors have explained why these bullet points won't teach the audience anything. They have argued why simple design principles in developing the slides does improve the retention of information. how people learn best from words and pictures, based on the theoretical underpinnings of multimedia learning theory, and, accordingly, to understand how to design effective multimedia instructional messages Multimedia learning .....read more »

In The Netherlands most medical schools have voluntary first clinical experiences for first year medical students. Recent Dutch research looked at the learning goals and learning outcome of a 4 week nursing attachment in Year 1 of medical school. The students actively participate in patient care by working as assistant nurse in a hospital or a nursing home. The students take part in reflection meetings after two weeks and at the end of the attachment. Several learning goals are formulated for these attachments The main educational goal set by the medical school is learning to empathise with patients. Other formal educational .....read more »

The Rap Guide to Evolution is a hip-hop exploration of modern biology, created by Canadian rap artist Baba Brinkman. The project owes its origins to the geneticist Dr. Mark Pallen, who specially requested “a rap version of the Origin of Species” for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in 2009. Baba went on to perform the show to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-Broadway in New York. The music videos and teaching resources on this site were developed with the support of the Wellcome Trust, in partnership with London’s SPL Productions. Find out more, more videos on this site. Thanks ScopeRelated .....read more »

A large iPad like table is used by students to learn human anatomy. Together with other forms of anatomy education a real new way of improving understanding of complicated human anatomy for students. You can watch a video about this computer and examples of it's use on the Stanford Med School site. The many ways of using this new technique is also described in this blogpost on Stanford Med School In the ongoing search for how best to explore and learn about the anatomy of the human body, Silicon Valley engineers have now joined a long list of doctors, artists, photographers .....read more »

We have discussed the term empathy several times. The most clarifying definition of empathy is based on viewing it as a process. This process of empathy consists of the following stages. The patient expresses feelings by way of verbal and non-verbal communication. Patients are not always aware of these expressions. The doctor also notices these emotions in himself more or less voluntary, more or less conscious. He or she coming aware of these feelings usually comes after the fact (affective empathy). Realizing these feelings as being from the patient is the cognitive empathy. Together with everything the doctor knows about the patient as .....read more »