Biomedical subjects

Charles L Bardes

Publications and source records attributed to Charles L Bardes.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Is medicine altruistic? A query from the medical school admissions office.

BACKGROUND: Applicants to medical school often state that they are motivated by a desire to help others. Admissions officers must evaluate these claims, but assessment of altruism is difficult and imprecise. SUMMARY: A purely utilitarian moral philosophy denies the possibility of altruism. However, the Enlightenment philosopher Hume described a force, sympathy, that engages channels of communication between persons and rewards benevolence. Although there are many pretenders to altruism, the medical school interview provides an opportunity to create a channel of sympathy and to assess its authenticity. CONCLUSIONS: By probing for evidence of clinical sympathy, the medical school interviewer may be able to verify whether the applicant's claims of altruism are authentic. Claims of altruism that have not been borne out in action should be viewed with skepticism.

Altruism↗

PubMed2005

Specifying student-patient encounters, web-based case logs, and meeting standards of the liaison committee on medical education.

Standard ED-2 of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) requires medical schools to specify the types of patients that students should encounter, the student's level of responsibility, and the appropriate setting for the encounter. The authors describe the process at Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City for meeting this standard through the development of a Web-based case log. The log permits the medical college to specify expectations for patient encounters and allows the students to record their encounters in an efficient, brief, and user-friendly manner. By downloading the student's reports directly into a database, the medical college can track successes and deficiencies in the student's clinical experiences. However, in response to a questionnaire administered in 2005, students generally expressed dissatisfaction with the case logs, which they described as intrusive busywork.

Clinical Clerkship↗

PubMed2004

Teaching, digression, and implicit curriculum.

BACKGROUND: Although medicine resides within contexts that have historical, cultural, and societal determinants, these are rarely addressed explicitly in current medical teaching. SUMMARY: The article describes a method of teaching in which mainstream biomedical learning is linked to digressions, which serve as the medium for considering the contexts of medicine, unmasking hidden messages, and broadening the scope of medical instruction. CONCLUSION: Teaching by digression encourages students to learn core clinical science while considering such otherwise neglected areas such as medical values, contexts, habits, and history. Integrating this consideration of the hidden assumptions of medical practice into mainstream medical learning allows students to understand modern biomedicine as a system that is historically, culturally, and socially conditioned.

Clinical Clerkship↗