Category: MedicalEducation

MEwens
Our personal handwashing rules: use hot water and soap, do it after potentially touching something yucky and sing “Happy Birthday” to be sure you’re scrubbing long enough.
Physicians, though, need to know a lot more. And a small study of third-year medical students in Germany finds that they aren’t entirely clear on when handwashing […]

MEwens
Conventional wisdom holds you should try to stay out of the hospital in July if at all possible, since that’s when new medical residents report for duty.
But while there have been studies looking at the question — like one published last year suggesting there are more fatal medication errors in July — until […]

MEwens
Cushioning the Blow: A focus on diseases for which there aren’t already good treatments is helping pharma companies get drugs approved by the FDA and restock pipelines, the WSJ reports. New drugs to treat melanoma, lupus and hepatitis C are among the 20 approved so far this year, compared to 21 for all […]

MEwens
The medical residents starting their training today belong to a generation that doesn’t think twice about broadcasting even intimate details of their lives via texts, Twitter and other social media.
That can get tricky when those doctors’ lives begin to include patients.
To help spark discussions of how residents can negotiate this new […]

MEwens
Generic Distinction: The Supreme Court ruled that makers of generic drugs, unlike their counterparts making the branded versions, aren’t liable for medication injuries that could have been avoided by an updated warning label, the WSJ reports. The logic: branded drugs are required by law to demonstrate safety and effectiveness and to have a […]

MEwens
The MCAT, the standardized test that students take to get into medical school, is getting an overhaul.
The next version of the test should focus less on testing just for students’ scientific knowledge and instead emphasize their critical analysis and reasoning, according to preliminary recommendations released today by the Association of American Medical Colleges, […]

Shirley S. Wang
The American Medical Association named Howard C. Bauchner, a pediatrician from Boston University School of Medicine as the next editor-in-chief of JAMA, the organization’s flagship medical journal.
Bauchner, who becomes the journal’s 16th editor in its 127-year history, replaces Catherine DeAngelis, who is stepping down July 1 after 11 years at the […]

MEwens
Proposed new work limits for medical residents were announced last summer and approved in the fall by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. And that giant raspberry sound you hear is from the directors of residency programs who responded to a Mayo Clinic survey on the changes, which include limiting the workday […]

MEwens
Physicians make good money compared to the average American, but they can also rack up some serious debt in medical school.
Read more this great post here

MEwens
The medical humanities movement is also reaching well beyond medical school.
Read more this great post here