Education Policy, Business and Technology

Essay warns against too much of a shift away from science in training future doctors

Inside Higher Ed: An organic chemist I know tells her doctors that she is a professor of Southern literature whenever she is in the hospital. That’s because organic chemistry has come to symbolize all the irrelevant science hoops that premedical and medical students jump through on the way to becoming physicians. Today, we are told, medical students should be learning “people skills,” placing medicine in the context of the community and learning how individuals make choices related to their health. These preferences are reflected in the revised medical admissions test rolled out earlier this year, with its newly added questions related to sociology, psychology and the humanities.

Read article