Opinions

Kathleen Tzan Kathleen Tzan (2 Posts)

Contributing Writer

Sidney Kimmel Medical College

Kathleen is a third-year medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia. She is strongly interested in holistic and alternative medicine with a focus on primary care and is planning on pursuing a career in Family Medicine.




Widening the Discussion of Mental Health in Medical School and Beyond

Published by Kathleen Tzan

A fellow student writer recently wrote that she wondered if depression were “just part of life as a medical student.” One of her professors had given a lecture on depression asking students to “think of how many people we knew with the signs of depression listed on his lecture slide” — excluding medical students of course, “because you’ve all got some of these.” There is something so terribly and inherently wrong with that statement.

Introduction to in-Training Mental Health Week 2016: A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Published by Joe Ladowski

My medical school, Indiana University, is one of the largest in the country with over 300 students in each graduating class. Sadly, each year it seems we lose one of our classmates to suicide. The surprising part? These numbers might be lower than the national average. In the United States, approximately 300 to 400 physicians commit suicide each year. A 2009 study in Academic Medicine reported that 12 percent of medical students had major depression and nearly six percent experienced suicide ideation. To visualize these numbers, in my class alone, statistically, 18 students have experienced suicide ideation and approximately 36 have major depression.

Resilience in Medical Education: Defining Burnout and How Role Models Can Help

Published by Rae Dong

Medical school is a notoriously challenging experience during which students undergo tremendous personal change and professional growth. Though the stressors that come along with this are varied and unique to each student’s context and experience, they may be categorized within a few common themes. Harvard psychiatrist Raymond Laurie has previously described the concept of “role strain” with respect to negotiating relationships with their families, friends, partners, peers, attending physicians and patients. Additionally, with regard to students’ concept of themselves, individuals who have high achievement may be challenged in new ways both intellectually and emotionally.

Why Would Anyone Choose Family Medicine?

Published by Farrah Fong

Throughout medical school and especially during our clinical rotations, students are often told to keep an open mind about choosing a specialty. This is sound advice, especially since many people change their minds once they are exposed to other fields. However, that does not mean that all specialties are perceived as equal — even in a primary-care focused medical school, third-year medical students often run into prejudice against FM. Worse, they may run into stereotypes about family med which could be enough to sway them away from the specialty they would really love.

The Dangerous Devolution of Physicians into Technicians

Published by Amanda King

With more applicants than ever, and a relatively static number of medical school and residency spots, there has been an increase in the use of metrics such as standardized test scores, GPAs and research publications to differentiate between applicants. Unfortunately, an emphasis on the unquantifiable attributes of physicians — the qualities that actually differentiate great clinicians from good ones — seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Untitled: The Persona of Medicine

Published by Chiemeziem Eke

As young children growing up, we all called each other by first name. So did our parents, relatives, teachers, and anyone else we ran into that wanted a way to identify who we were. As adults, attending physicians are still called by their first names around the same group of people from childhood. However, patients and most of the clinical staff may not even know the physician’s first name. When transitioning from a senior resident to a faculty physician, some event occurs where that beloved first name is molted. After the right of passage is completed, the rookie doctor becomes a veteran doctor; free of restrictions, supervision, and a first name.

Not Safe, Not Fair: The UK Junior Doctor Contract Dispute

Published by Alisha Burman

In the UK, there is currently a dispute over the new junior doctor contract. “Junior doctors” are defined as anyone in training and who is not a consultant. Many have deemed the new contract neither safe nor fair, and despite doctors striking, the Department of Health are intending to impose this contract in August 2016. On April 26, there will be a 48-hour full strike including emergency care — the first of its kind in the history of the National Health Services (NHS) — in the hope that the government will change their mind.

Can We Talk About it Now? Mistreatment of Women in Medical Education

Published by Abraham Khan

In light of this recent occasion, I would like to draw attention to the sexual harassment of a particularly vulnerable population that is a result of a unique power dynamic: they have no income, they have amassed significant debt and they depend on the subjective opinion of their abusers for validation of their work. Most frustrating, is that many of the corrective actions taken over the last 25 years have had a limited effect on changing this specific culture of abuse. This specific population is medical students.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Physiology

Published by Nita Chen, MD

To most students, physiology is a difficult and mind boggling subject. Thankfully, Dr. Tanaka and Dr. Koyama through Becom Co. Ltd. have poured their love and patience into an illustrated work of organ-based physiology, The Manga Guide to Physiology. Presented in the Japanese graphic novel style of manga, the manga follows nursing student protagonist Kumiko as she prepares for her make-up examination in physiology.

What We Learned Starting a Business in Medical School

Published by Parth Shukla

Starting a business is a time-consuming and arduous venture, one filled with risk and every uncertainty. Pursuing this during medical school is a whole different story. My name is Parth Shukla. My friend Neal Dharmadhikari and I started our first business together in medical school called Perfect H&P. It’s a history and physical template notebook you can find on Amazon designed for medical students, nursing students and physician assistant students and residents to use on the wards. We launched in late 2015 and so far, we’ve sold in over 25 states. We broke even, created larger margins, donated wholesale profits, paid our rent and helped out a ton of learning students. The best part? We had no idea how to do any of this just six months ago.

Permission to Speak: Fighting for Health Care as a Human Right

Published by Karim Sariahmed

Almost every morning, one of our physiology lecturers asks a question. Usually, it’s a question to which most of my 200 classmates would know the answer. Every day, the professor asks their question, often losing their rhythm in the twenty seconds it takes to shake an answer out of us. The silence lingers until finally they get a response, often whispered like an embarrassing secret by someone sitting near the front. The timid self-consciousness on display in this small ritual is a major part of the socialization that happens in medical school.

Karim Sariahmed Karim Sariahmed (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer

Louis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University

Karim Sariahmed is a first-year medical student at the Louis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. He helps lead Temple's chapter of Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP). His Philadelphia community teaches him how to organize. He tweets about both @sariahmed.