Some state that with evidence based medicine, increasing technical knowledge, technical procedures and technical possibilities the empathy has vanished from the patient doctor interaction or at least was minimized. Medicine has moved from the humanities towards science. Is another transformation taking place. Is medicine again moving towards the humanities, is empathy again an important feature for a physician? Is the focus on technique shifting towards empathy during medical education? Or are doctors loosing empathy after medical education because they have to become clerks and mechanics due to increasing bureaucracy. Is empathy rehabilitated in the medical curricula? More questions than answers. Moreover, .....read more »

Recently updated the external web page for our residency training for psychiatry. It's in Dutch and still rather dull. There's also a website for residents of psychiatry on the intra net. It's even duller. Mostly outdated documents. Wouldn't a Wiki be an alternative instead for a static web page? Advantages of a Wiki It can combine several heterogeneous systems such as documents, files, videos etc. etc. Editing can be delegated to the participants in this case residents in training Information can be updated easily by the different participants instead of one editor A disadvantage could be improper editing or using the wiki for purposes not .....read more »

In a recent study the authors compared reflective writing produced either by an electronic (blog) format or a traditional written (essay). Students during their internal medicine clerkship participated in this study. The reflective essay was followed by a faculty moderated small group discussion. In the other condition the students had to post two writings to a faculty moderated group blog and provide at least one comment on a peer's post. Student writing addressed seven main themes: (i) being humanistic; (ii) professional behaviour; (iii) understanding caregiving relationships; (iv) being a student; (v) clinical learning; (vi) dealing with death and dying, and .....read more »

Great improvement, could be used for medical textbooks with explaining video's, patient samples on video, pictures, interactive graphics etc. Makes medical education even more enjoyable and interactive. Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth." Related posts: Terrific introduction to blogging, book review PresentationZen Design Book Review Anatomical Cook Book ..read more »

Medical students have to do a psychiatry clerkship during their training. At the end of their psychiatric clerkship they have to take their final examination on psychiatry for their medical degree. This exam consists of three parts. First they'll have to interview a patient. This interview is being watched and rated by a psychiatrist on several competencies such as interpersonal and communicational skills, and professionalism. Next they have to discuss this patient with the same psychiatrist to test their clinical reasoning in psychiatry and usually they are being questioned in this same exam about psychiatry at large, as a kind .....read more »

Important topic since drop out from med school is often accompanied with a direct economic loss to society. Knowledge about drop out could possibly prevent drop out from med school. In a recent literature review 625 studies were found about the topic of drop out from med school. Only 13 were included in this analyses because they attempted to account for confounding and were better in overall quality. The 13 studies eventually included originated from the USA (n = 5), Australia (n = 3), the UK (n = 2), the Netherlands (n = 2) and South Africa (n = 1). The influence .....read more »

These ten tips are from an article for surgeons but the ten tips are also applicable for all forms of adult education. Especially in training residents the hidden curriculum and ad hoc events occurring in a convenient pause in the hectic daily activity are important educational encounters. In this day and age medical training should be as efficient and effective as possible. For me the insight that training residents is making use of adult education was an eye opener. In adult education it is important what the trainee does instead of attending passive transfer of information. This article not .....read more »

If you can predict academic success by personality factors, then med schools should consider including measures of these personality factors during their selection process. Mental toughness and stress tolerance are just two that came up. A recent systematic review looked at prospective cohort studies since 2000 on the subject of medical students’ scores on valid personality tests and objective measures of performance and stress. In all seven relevant and selected studies conscientiousness was the most important personality factor to predict long-term success in medical training. Furthermore, the evidence from these seven studies also suggests that social traits such as extraversion and .....read more »

About two third of medical students I am teaching is female. Nevertheless, only few surgeons are women. Especially in general surgery, female physicians are clearly underrepresented. This is in The Netherlands but also in Switzerland and probably in your country too. Why is it, doesn't surgery appeal to women, is it the male-dominated culture of surgeons and, as a result, suboptimal mentorship and a lack of role models? And how is the current situation for female surgeons with regard to their personal and professional lives? An investigation in Switzerland by anonymous questionnaire among 318 female surgeons and surgical residents revealed: .....read more »

Young people are high users of the Internet but we know very little about how they use the Internet, how they “are distributing their engagement across the various resources of the Internet”. This knowledge might be useful for learning and education. Researchers collected data from a nationally representative face to face survey of young people (n=1069) in Britain aged 8, 12, 14 and 17–19. These four age groups were selected to capture young people’s experiences of new technologies at different developmental and social stages. The four profiles The peripherals. A large group (31%) of young people that use the Internet the least frequent. .....read more »