Medical Student Editor
Indiana University School of Medicine
Aida is a second-year medical student at Indiana University School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, Aida earned her Bachelor of Science in environmental science from Indiana University Bloomington and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. In June 2018, she walked from Louisville, Kentucky to St. Louis, Missouri to witness to the forced migration of climate change refugees and to advocate for her church's divestment from fossil fuels. Aida feels called to work at the intersection of medicine, anti-racism, & environmental justice.
During our August delegation, we learned from Puerto Rican experts in their fields and acting first responders about implementing lasting social change since Hurricane María. Each expert’s lecture seemed to revolve around relief, recovery and resilience.
Seeking to document the experiences of students in street medicine groups at medical schools across the country, I decided to start with my own institution, the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine.
The room is unassuming from the outside. It’s a tiny space not much larger than a storage closet tucked into an office in the school of public health. I do my usual clinic routine in reverse: notebook pulled out of pocket and white coat slipped off and left outside.
Why does a life-saving drug, for infants no less, carry such an astronomical price tag? Nusinersen falls into the category of ‘orphan drug,’ a drug designed for a disease so rare that it becomes fiscally unsustainable for corporate sponsors to invest and market the medication to the public.
EMRs have been devastating — residents spend 60% of their time in front of the computer writing their note, where it used to be five minutes in shorthand. We have not made things more efficient. We’ve made things worse for physicians in practice.
When you pick a residency, the name is irrelevant, where you go is irrelevant, your score is irrelevant. If you don’t like the people, your life will be miserable.
When you leave medical school and go to your residency, what you realize is it’s a lot more than OnlineMedEd. No kidding — pelvic anatomy is a 20-minute video. Turns out there’s more to know than that. If you’re going to become a gynecologist who does surgery, you’re going to learn a hell of a lot more than I teach there.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
Since its inception in 2012, in-Training’s mission has remained the same: to serve the global medical student community. In 2017, we continued to see progress in this direction.
For Dr. Francois Luks, the pen is mightier than the sword. Armed with ink and a blank pad of paper, he begins to draw out a stomach. With a stroke here and some shading there, he deftly sketches the anastomoses of a procedural resection.
Over 100 years since the 1910 Flexner Report resulted in the closure of all but two predominantly Black medical schools, underrepresented minority medical students and faculty still struggle to surface amid the rising currents of medical education.
Writer-in-Training
University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine
Ty is a member of the Class of 2020 at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and is a 2017 Albert Schweitzer Fellow in Chicago. He is a California raised, mixed Black & Filipino humanist who thinks often about culture, diversity, and identity. You can often find him dreaming by day, writing by night, and studying in the hours in between.
Ty lives to build relationships and communities; if you fancy a dialogue, please feel free to reach out!
