medical education
The Insanity of Recertification
Studying for the boards is like stuffing your face at a hot dog–eating contest: The first few hundred pages are intriguing and tasty; the next few hundred are interesting, but your brain is feeling sluggish. The remaining thousand pages are just confettied sauerkraut delivered by dump-truck onto a comatose slop of neurons. More
Should Med Schools Be Renamed for Donors?
24 of the country’s 141 medical schools sport a donor’s name rather than the plain old university name. The pace is increasing, as are the number of eyebrows being raised. More
Board Recertification: A Waste of Time?
It used to be that you tackled the medical board exams just once after residency. Then you went into practice and never looked at a No. 2 pencil again. More
When Doctors Feel Fear
I remember the first time I laid eyes on an actual amygdala, after slicing through a brain with a repurposed kitchen knife in neuroanatomyclass. That’s it? I thought. That nickel-size splotch tucked below the temporal lobes was the seat of my fears? It was monumentally underwhelming and even lacked
the poetic almond shape that its Latin name connotes.
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Recertifying Doctors
In 1990, seeking to keep pace with the rapid advances in medicine, the American Board of Internal Medicine initiated the “recertification process.†Now, doctors must take an exam every 10 years. More
Social Mission of Med Schools
What exactly is the mission of a medical school? Is it to train the best and smartest doctors? Is to tend to our nation’s health? Is it to further medical knowledge? More
