Writer-in-Training
Faculty of Medicine of Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kelly Aminian is a first year medical student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She holds a BSc in neuroscience from Carleton University and an MSc in clinical neuroscience from King’s College London. Her hobbies include playing harp and travelling.
Distilling lengthy science publications into short summaries is challenging. The pioneers at Useful Science have made it their mission to communicate evidence-based snippets of science to the general public.
Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’ said, “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The role of nutrition in health has been recognized since the beginning of medicine, yet somehow nutrition education has fallen by the wayside in most medical curricula. Given that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and obesity has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer, nutrition should be a focal point of medical education.
Asian Medical Student Association (AMSA) Pakistan organized an inter-medical college quiz competition on March 4, 2015 at Frontier Medical College in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The event was organized on a national level in collaboration with Asian Medical Student Association International, an organization that represents medical students in 16 countries throughout Asia and the Asia-Pacific.
Parallels are often drawn between the fields of aviation and medicine. It has been said that the number of hospital-related preventable deaths in the United States alone is equivalent to 20 large airplane crashes, with no survivors, each week. With the advancements made in flight safety, doctors are now looking to the field of aviation to improve patient safety.
Figure 1, the Instagram for doctors, aspires to change the way that physicians around the world collaborate. Figure 1 is a free app for sharing medical images. The vast collection of archived images allows health professionals and medical learners to view everything from classic textbook cases of winged scapula to the once-in-a-lifetime cases of harlequin ichthyosis. Dr. Joshua Landy is the chief medical officer of Figure 1. Landy, along with co-founders Greg Levey and Richard Penner, officially launched the app in January 2013.
“One of the major problems of rural health is the chronic shortage of health care practitioners in rural, remote and northern areas,” said Dr. Raymond Pong, founder of the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research in Canada.
On November 22, several hundred premedical and medical students gathered at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) Training Grounds. It was the second Training Grounds sponsored by AMSA this fall, with the topic of “Leading the Change in the Culture of Medicine.” Although a popular topic being addressed throughout all of medical education, Dr. Jeff Koetje, AMSA’s Education and Research Director, clarified that AMSA Training Grounds is unique. “These conferences provide a safe place for students to learn about these topics away from their home institution,” Dr. Koetje said. “Students can come here and discover that they are not alone.”
In his rousing and intermittently aggressive plenary address to the thousands congregated last week at the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) Excellence in Education conference in Milan, Richard Horton bemoaned the stagnation of modern medical education, implicating everything from the ivory-tower universities of old to the world health care economy for the plummeting decline of medical education. “Two percent of total expenditures in medicine are invested on education,” the editor-in-chief of The Lancet …
On March 29, 2014, the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association (APAMSA) hosted the “Becoming Physician Leaders in APIA Health” Regional Conference at Rush Medical College in Chicago, IL. Medical students from multiple medical schools in Wisconsin, Illinois and Kansas attended the conference. The conference was to raise awareness and advocate the most pressing health issues APIA population in the United States face today, and to promote leadership among Asian Pacific American medical students. The …
For students at West Virginia University School of Medicine, studying anatomy now consists of more than just furiously comparing textbook images to a cadaver. In addition to their traditional dissection-based coursework, they also learn anatomical structures from a living patient using ultrasound technology. Pioneered by Dr. Joseph Minardi, director of the emergency ultrasound fellowship at the WVU School of Medicine, the MD curriculum has begun integrating ultrasound education into all four years of its program. …
Medicine is “no longer what the doctor wants,” Dr. Lynn Crespo said. “It’s what the patient wants and needs.” Crespo, Associate Dean for Education at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine-Greenville (USCSOM-Greenville), believes that medical education should reflect this change. USCSOM-Greenville, which opened its doors to students in 2012, is one of many new medical schools that is changing the way that physicians-in-training learn their profession. For decades, teaching medical students in the United States has relied on a tried-and-true method: two years of lecture-based …
In her address entitled “Leading the Dance of Change” at the 2013 AAMC Annual Meeting, Dr. Valerie Williams characterized the American health care system as a dance, a fitting metaphor for the complex interplay of fluidity and form that are necessary for the practice of medicine. Dance, like health care, involves “a true and equal partnership between the acts of leading and following,” said Williams, requiring balance, learning and the ability to improvise. Regrettably, the …
Founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
University of Colorado School of Medicine
My name is Ajay Major, and I am currently an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in lymphoma and myeloma, and a physician-publisher in the medical education and narrative medicine spaces.
My journey into publishing began in April 2012 when I founded in-Training, the online peer-reviewed publication for medical students, and served as editor-in-chief for four years. Since that time, we have founded several additional online publications for the medical education community, including in-House, The Palate, Mosaic in Medicine, and Intervene Upstream.
To support these publications, we founded Pager Publications, Inc., a 501c3 non-profit literary corporation that curates and supports peer-edited publications for the medical education community, in 2014. Since our inception, Pager Publications, Inc. has published six print books, with all proceeds used to support our constituent publications.
