Medical School: Anatomy’s Out, Systems Biology’s In
Sending students to the anatomy lab to dissect a cadaver in their first week of medical school may be a fading ritual. At Georgetown, students spend a few months in courses called “Physician-Patient Communication” and “Social and Cultural Issues in Health Care” before they start with the cutting — and when they do get to dissection, it’s in a unit on limbs, not in an old-school anatomy class.
That’s one example of the way med schools are shuffling their curricula to try to catch up with the changing demands — both scientific and cultural — doctors face, the Washington Post reports.
In a new case-based teaching method at Johns Hopkins, students might have a unit on heart disease where they look at sample heart attack cases to understand the genetics of heart disease, the physiology of the heart, medication options, costs and benefits of various treatments and how environment can affect heart disease risks, the Post says.
Older teaching methods at med schools tended to be more siloed into departments like anatomy, physiology, pharmacology; students didn’t really integrate what they were learning until they started doing clinical rotations.
Similar changes could be coming for pre-meds, whose basic course requirements have remained largely unchanged for […]
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