Tag: medical school

It Will Take More Than “Courage” to Restore Public Trust in Medicine

Judah Kreinbrook, a first year medical student, responds to a post on Sensible Medicine by a medical student that exaggerated the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccines while expressing anger at how trust in medicine has been undermined. Having been raised by a family steeped in antivaccine views, Kreinbrook invokes his journey to SBM to gently correct his fellow medical student and...

/ December 31, 2022

The Residency Match is Broken

The National Resident Matching Program (Match), the program to align med school applicants with their preferred residency program, is broken and filled with disincentives. The fix might be easy.

/ April 3, 2021

Ad-Conned: A Critical Look At CASPer

Medical schools are facing a flood of applicants, and have started using for-profit tests alleged to assess people skills as a way to distinguish candidates. The evidence is weak, and lacks transparency.

/ January 29, 2021

“Hard science” and medical school

One of the recurring themes of this blog, not surprisingly given its name, is the proper role of science in medicine. As Dr. Novella has made clear from the very beginning, we advocate science-based medicine (SBM), which is what evidence-based medicine (EBM) should be. SBM tries to overcome the shortcomings of EBM by taking into account all the evidence, both scientific and...

/ August 2, 2010

CAM on campus: Ethics

In a previous post I described a lecture given by a faculty member to first-year medical students on my campus introducing us to integrative medicine (IM). Here I describe his lecture to the second-year class on legal and ethical aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Dr. P began his lecture by describing CAM using the now-familiar NCCAM classification. He gave the...

/ April 8, 2010

When “CAM” is mandatory: A science-based medical student’s dilemma

Early in the history of this blog, I wrote a rather long post expressing my dismay at the infiltration of unscientific “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM) modalities into American medical schools. In it, I listed the medical schools that had embraced pseudoscience through having started a CAM/IM program (a list desperately in need of an update). Moreover, we...

/ March 30, 2009

CAM on campus: Homeopathy

I am quite proud of my medical school. The dedicated faculty and dynamic curriculum produce graduates of excellent clinical skill with a strong sense of service. Initially I was too focused on coursework to pay much mind to the student-run interest group in “cross-cultural and integrative medicine” and the occasional extracurricular CAM event. More recently, however, I noticed that such events had...

/ March 1, 2009