Writer-in-Training
Emory School of Medicine
Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Amara has bounced around the country a bit before landing back in her hometown for medical school. She enjoys hiking, traveling, exploring the city and thinking about fun things like human evolution. Email her if you’d like to talk!
I am writing to share my concern regarding a series of unusual and troubling cases affecting medical professionals across the country. It manifests as a selective form of hemineglect in otherwise neurologically intact individuals.
The practice of humanism must be at the core of medicine, and this different model, entitled the biopsychosocial (BPS) model, permits and exemplifies this practice.
A patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) suddenly develops respiratory distress and hypoxemia. Her lungs sound clear bilaterally. She is placed on supplemental oxygen via face-mask while a chest angiography is ordered to assess the possibility of a pulmonary embolism.
Nutritional education, as an appendage to conventional medical education, has the power to close the gap by equipping physicians with more well-rounded knowledge to help patients manage the more unmanageable conditions.
I want my residents and attending physicians to be aware of the elements that have so far shaped my medical school experience–a certain racial awareness, if you will–and to be as enthusiastic about teaching me as I am about learning from them.
The best mentor-mentee relationships I am a part of have allowed me to make mistakes while encouraging me and giving me targeted ways of doing better the next time around. They have also consisted of developing realistic goals and expectations. But, above all, they have taken what I bring to the table and helped elevate what is already there, not change it.
Previously, the only health care provider who possessed a doctorate degree was the physician. However, with the rise in educational standards across the United States, many health care professionals now must earn doctorates in their field before even beginning their careers.
Whenever my friends or family ask, “How’s medical school?” I have a simple, scripted response … But this response relays a fraction of what medical school has been like.
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.
As institutions of higher learning are becoming increasingly diverse, the portraiture that hangs in these institutions should reflect the bodies that inhabit their halls. Here, I argue that recency is particularly needed in academic medicine, and will propose some strategies for achieving it in our academic medical centers.
Columnist
Yale School of Medicine
Max is a third-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine, with a background in civil and environmental engineering, and bioengineering.
White Coat and a Hoodie
Attending Howard University gave Max a foundation for and continues to inform how he approaches issues related to injustice. Now in medical school, he has made it one of his focal interests to learn about and contribute to progress towards health equity, nationally and globally. Through this column, he will share stories on his experience as a Black man in medicine, and insights on topics of race, class, health equity, and medical education.
