Just thought it was pretty damn cool that my classmate Dora made CNN and the AP about our new curriculum. I feel kinda bad, I have no big crazy research interests like her. Just hope I can make some sort of impact with my patients and my community. That’s a decent goal, right?

There’s a somewhat random quote from Citizens for the Right to Know about some fears about the new curriculum, but I know there’s probably more people in my class interested in public health, community health, and family practice because of the new scholarly concentration . I think specialization is fairly common at most hardcore research institutions, anyway, and most upperclassmen did research or community work anyway, even before this new curriculum made a track mandatory.

bq(quote). Joan Werblun, volunteer executive director for Citizens for the Right to Know, said Stanford’s experiment, if widely copied, could encourage specialization when managed health care increasingly “shuttles people to the general practitioner.”
“I don’t know if this is going to work,” said Werblun, a former nurse who heads the Sacramento-based patient advocacy group. “Managed care could turn around and bite Stanford.”

Update: Seeing as though our entire class passed both molecular biology and histology a couple weeks ago (which hasn’t happened in 5 years) and our anatomy midterm yesterday went the best it’s ever gone since the anatomy professor started teaching here, I’m giving the curriculum a thumbs up so far.

Update 2: GruntDoc couldn’t be more wrong about Stanford students.

The whole point of the new curriculum is to give us some depth of knowledge in the medical field, instead of just the fire-hose version of breadth. CNN got it wrong–they’re not like majors, they’re like minors, and all health related. The first eight: Molecular Medicine, Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, Community Health and Public Service, Humanities and Bioethics, Immunology, Women’s Health, and Health Services and Policy Research.

Sure, medical school is a graduate program, but medicine doesn’t work in a bubble; there are social issues, community issues, research to do, policy, technology–issues that, I think, physicians should have some background in if they want to make the most of their practice. (Note: the new curriculum isn’t all that entirely different from what Stanford med students have been doing for years–70% of the class takes an extra year to do research, manage one of our two student-run clinics, pursue another degree, learn a foreign language, or volunteer abroad. The fact that the university is now trying to facilitate and organize our extracurricular interests is secondary; our interests existed long before any curriculum reform began.) I don’t care if Stanford requires 200 hours or 2,000; I can’t think of any person in my class who won’t do beyond the 200, because we’re passionate . We’re sponges. We want to soak up all the knowledge and wisdom that we can. And we’re the furthest from lab-rat masochist gunner medical students as you can meet. Some of our students even take six years. Yes! Six! Generally because they’ve got families, partners, or children that they want to raise, or decide to go get the Ph.D., too.

Medicine’s changing, GruntDoc. I think there’s a fairly common sentiment in my class that we’re not happy with the direction medicine is going–the health care system is a disaster, patients have growing distrust with doctors, doctors are pressured to practice medicine in a hurried, who’s-next manner, and it concerns us. I want to be a patient advocate, not the adversary. I want to be the best clinician I can be (we’ve now already started learning how to do patient histories and physical exams in the first year, something the article never mentioned), but I want to make broader changes, too. Idealistic? Absolutely. But frankly, anything’s better than the status quo right now, and if I don’t do it, it doesn’t look like anyone else is stepping up to bat.

Down off the soapbox now.

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