Match Day 2013 at the Pritzker School of Medicine (video)

Holly J. Humphrey, MD'83, and James N. Woodruff, MD, describe the Match Day experience at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine as the medical students discover where they will be placed for their residencies. Look at the pure joy in their faces:



The most popular specialties chosen this year by Pritzker students were Internal Medicine (21), Pediatrics (11), Family Medicine (6), Obstetrics-Gynecology (6), and General Surgery (5).

For more information, see the Match Results at http://bit.ly/Yz681a

Disclaimer: I am an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at UChicago.

A school without books - any downsides of switching to digital-only?

Below are are several related videos from the WSJ YouTube channel. My suggestion is to watch them all before forming an opinion.

Tablet Guides Med Students in Gross Anatomy Lab -- A digital dissection manual, published by a professor and students at Columbia's medical college, aims to improve the gross anatomy student experience:



A High School Without Textbooks -- Archbishop Stepinac High School, in White Plains, N.Y., is one of the first schools in the U.S. to do away with paper textbooks. Instead, the all-boys prep school requires students to use tablets and laptops in class:



Children in some Chicago suburbs who go to standard, public-funded schools are required to have either an iPad or Google Chromebook. These devices replace some, or all, of their textbooks. According to many parents, the results so far are mixed.

Can Games Help Improve Education? A growing number of education experts, school districts and companies are applying what young people love about games and gaming to new tools for teaching core subjects. But do they work? The current generation of educational games leaves a lot of room for improvement:



5 Tips for Parents of Tablet-Addicted Kids -- How young is too young to be using an iPad or other touch-screen media device? What should parents do if they can't get their children off the tablet?



The short answer: "Children learn best when they interact with people, not screens."

Top 5 Tech Tips from a Teacher -- Here are the Top 5 Tech Tips from the all-digital "Ohio teacher of the year" who records videos at night and texts her students. However, studies have shown that is it not possible for "all students to be engaged 100% of the time". Human brain needs a break after about 20 minutes of intensive education:



The videos above bring the logical question: If most of the learning will be done via apps, videos and games, do children need to go to the actual school building? To faciliate normal psychological development, they can comminicate with their peers at other venues such as basketball games, karate classes, group practices, etc.

Related:

Six Advantages of Online Learning - WSJ YouTube http://bit.ly/1cJrAK0

Dr Topol to med students: "When I was in medical school, the term "digital" was reserved for the rectal examination"

Here are some excerpts from the Baylor College of Medicine commencement address by Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, delivered yesterday, May 22, 2012. This should be a required reading for everyone involved in healthcare, which is basically everybody because each and every one of us will be a patient one day.

Eric Topol to medical students: "When I was in medical school, the term "digital" was reserved for the rectal examination."

"You sleep with your cell phone and prize it right up there with food and water. We have evolved to a new species of man. We are Homo distractus!"

The benefits of digital medicine are clear to Dr. Topol who shares the story of a patient he saw last week: "I asked him to put his fingers on the 2 sensors on the back of my iPhone case so I could do his electrocardiogram—ECG—that was normal. And free, by the way. Then instead of using a stethoscope to listen to his heart, I used a portable pocket-sized high-resolution ultrasound device and within a minute I could see every heart structure—the heart muscle thickness and function, the valves, the size of the 4 chambers. Why would I ever listen for lub-dub when I can see everything? I haven't used a stethoscope for over 2 years to listen to a patient's heart."

From Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) YouTube channel: 2012 Commencement Speaker, Dr. Eric Topol, spoke on May 21, 2012:



Here is Eric Topol's presentation at Health at Google:



References:

Baylor College of Medicine commencement address by Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute

Comments from Twitter

Quoc-Dien Trinh, MD @qdtrinh: Makes it sound cool. “@DrVes: Dr Topol to med studs: When I was in med school, the term "digital" was reserved for the rectal examination"

$295,000 In Medical School Debt... Why do medical schools charge students so much money?

Rob Centor:

"Why do medical schools charge students so much money? It was not this way when I went to medical school. I paid an average of $1000 per year in the early 1970s.

Using an inflation calculator, that would become around $5000 per year in current dollars. Yet that same school and most state schools charge 3 times that much."

References:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/23/295000-in-medical-school_n_473601.html
http://www.medrants.com/archives/5327

Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.

Medical school letters of recommendation have formally been replaced by tweets

Doctor_V's tweets in Brizzly (click to enlarge the image) - read from the bottom of the screenshot.

Doctor_V:

If you are a medical school I highly suggest you admit @beccacamp .@LeeAase I don't know if Mayo School of Medicine takes Twitter recommendations but I formally recommend @beccacamp. Medical school letters of recommendation have formally been replaced by tweets.

Indeed. And if the tweets are by Doctor_V, they should be strongly considered in the admission process... :)

Nursing student successfully challenges dissmissal from school because of Facebook photo

A Kansas college is facing a legal challenge over its dismissal of a nursing student who posted online a photograph of a human placenta studied in class - the WSJ video is embedded above.

The lawsuit includes a letter that Ms. Byrnes wrote to the college apologizing for what she called a "lapse in judgment" but asking that she not be dismissed.

The school said the four students are allowed to reapply to continue their nursing studies in August 2011.

Most reader comments on the story follow this pattern: "I fail to see why this posting should result in dismissal from school. The student broke no confidentiality, and the posting was certainly not obscene."

References:
Odd Facebook Post Leads to Student's Ouster, Suit. WSJ.

Current school system is failing boys - how to re-engage them in learning - TED video

At TEDxPSU, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints 3 reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys. The first part of the talk points to some eye-opening facts about how the current school system is failing boys.