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Biomedical subjects

Julie M Aultman

Publications and source records attributed to Julie M Aultman.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Making fun of patients: medical students' perceptions and use of derogatory and cynical humor in clinical settings.

PURPOSE: It has long been known that medical students become more cynical as they move through their training, and at times even exhibit "ethical erosion." This study examines one dimension of this phenomenon: how medical students perceive and use derogatory and cynical humor directed at patients. METHOD: The authors conducted five voluntary focus groups over a three-month period with 58 third- and fourth-year medical students at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in 2005. After transcribing the taped interviews, the authors analyzed the data using qualitative methods and identified themes found across groups. RESULTS: The categories that emerged from the data were (1) categories of patients who are objects of humor, including those deemed "fair game" due to obesity or other conditions perceived as preventable or self-inflicted; (2) locations for humor; (3) the "humor game," including student, resident, and faculty interaction and initiation of humor; (4) not-funny humor; and (5) motives for humor, including coping and stress relief. CONCLUSIONS: The authors offer recommendations for addressing the use of derogatory humor directed at patients that include a more critical, open discussion of these attitudes and behaviors with medical students, residents, and attending physicians, and more vigorous attention to faculty development for residents.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Medicine and place: an inquiry.

This essay explores the various places inhabited by doctors and patients, in order to lead doctors to a more complex understanding of their patients' experiences of illness. Using Adam Haslett's "The Good Doctor" (2002), we examine what happens when doctors enter the worlds of their patients, both the literal landscapes of their patients' homes and the hidden landscapes of their minds. We illustrate the impact place has on doctors' understanding of their patients and on the patients' attitudes toward their illness. In addition, we examine how place informs readers' perceptions of both the coherence and the divide between the worlds of doctor and patient.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2005

Uncovering the hidden medical curriculum through a pedagogy of discomfort.

What lies beneath the formal or overt curriculum may impair students' professional growth and development, including their ability to foster genuine relationships with patients and others, and may contribute to the inadvertent, often negative attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors expressed by medical students and witnessed by educators within and external to the classroom environment. To understand the impact a hidden medical curriculum has on both students and educators, I look at one particular model often used in medical education--the physician-patient relationship. I show how this therapeutic relationship ought to be understood through a pedagogy of discomfort, a model developed by Megan Boler (Feeling Power; Emotions and Education, 1999), as a way to uncover the hidden curriculum as it engages students in a collective, critical discourse through which their sense of self in relation to others becomes the groundwork for their professional and moral development. Understanding the physician-patient relationship through a pedagogy of discomfort also teachers students how to critically think about the different values and beliefs held by physicians and patients and how to begin to recognize themselves as physicians in relation to their patients and others.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

The limits of narrative: medical student resistance to confronting inequality and oppression in literature and beyond.

INTRODUCTION: Upon designing and implementing a literature course on family values for Year 4 medical students, we found that while the supposed benefits of literary inquiry were to lead students to a deeper understanding of difficult issues such as illness and violence in the family, many of our students were unable to engage critically with the course material. This, we believe, was a result of their resistance to confronting issues such as inequality and oppression. This paper is an attempt to theorise student resistance to difficult, unruly subjects they encounter in a literature class, particularly those surrounding race, gender, social class and sexual identity. METHODS: We modify some of the expansive claims made by narrative medicine and put forth a new pedagogical and curricular approach to the uses of literature in medical education. RESULTS: We found that many students resisted course material and corresponding discussions, especially those related to sexual identity and non-traditional family values, male-female relationships and white racism. DISCUSSION: To reduce student resistance, we pose a more critical approach to narrative inquiry in medical settings that may deepen students' willingness to imagine what it is like to be someone who is suffering, and to work against oppressive social structures that sustain such suffering. Thus, we recommend moving narrative inquiry beyond a focus on the self and the patient in that individualised, circumscribed relationship and into a collective process involving the social, political, cultural and economic conditions that affect health and well-being.

Curriculum↗
PubMed2005

Corridors.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Humans↗
PubMed2002

Neonatal damage of the ventral hippocampus impairs working memory in the rat.

We investigated if a developmental lesion of the ventral hippocampus, studied previously as an animal model of schizophrenia, impairs performance in working memory tests related to the prefrontal cortex. Adult rats with a neonatal or adult excitotoxic lesion of the ventral hippocampus were tested in a continuous delayed alternation and a discrete paired-trial variable-delay alternation task. Performance of rats with the neonatal lesion was impaired as compared with control rats on both tasks, whereas performance of rats with the adult lesion was not altered in either task. The pattern of impaired performance, that worsened with increasing delays in neonatally lesioned rats, resembled that reported previously in animals with adult lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex. These results indicate that an early developmental, but not adult hippocampal, insult impairs performance in tasks sensitive to the integrity of the prefrontal cortex, and suggest that working memory may be compromised by neonatal damage of the ventral hippocampus.

Animals↗