Month: March 2017

From My Students Most of All

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By Zev Leifer

The Talmud (Taanis 7a) quotes Rabbi Chanina who declared that, “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues and most from students.”  There is a tendency amongst educators, in general and more so, I suspect, amongst medical educators (given their many years of training and vast experience) to take a top-down approach.  This approach assumes that we have a contractual relationship wherein “I have the knowledge and we are here so that I can share it with you”.

In contrast, the digital age has humbled many of “our” generation since the best advice when faced with a new piece of digital equipment or software, is to “ask a ten-year old” (even an anonymous ten-year old).  But our students?!  I submit that example is a challenge – to ego and to the “Central Dogma of Education” that information flow is unidirectional.

I would like to share some of my experiences teaching digital pathology, to perhaps update that notion…
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What’s a Nice Nurse like You doing in a Medical School?

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Hearing the Call:  A Feature on How Physicians and Medical Educators Came to Understand their Vocation

By Anne Gill

Back in the 70’s, I called a surgeon to tell him his patient was bleeding from a cholecystectomy incision.  “When did you go to medical school?” he screamed.  “Until I say differently, that is serosanguineous fluid!”  Stung by this rebuke, I meekly added ABD’s to stanch the flow of “serosangunious fluid” and awaited the patient’s return to the OR…
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“Seeing” the Doctor: Depicting the Physician’s Self-Identity

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By Stacey McClintick

What do you what to be when you grow up?  Do I even have to?  Can I cry now?  Can I show who I am?  I can only hope you will understand and be able to take away from me all that I have… because that is what I want to give.

I am not who you think I am.  Strong on the outside… an unstoppable ramble of insecurity,  Inquisitiveness and love on the inside.  I am a mom, a Maine, a wife, a soldier, a sister, an engineer, a daughter, a student doctor, a neighbor, a college student, a carpool mom, an artist… my own self gets lost behind all these things.

I lost “rank” to save my kids and my husband, but out of curiosity and hope for challenges and to experience life, I have gained so much more.  But it hurts sometimes to not be recognized in my current position for the experiences I have had.

At the same time it is hard to focus on the facts in medicine when the very curiosity of life which pulled me in persistently tries to pull me away.  ADHD?  Maybe… I have never given up… is that my downfall?

Here, regardless, I can be what I am.  In art my mistakes open up an opportunity for something wonderful I had never thought of before.  In life/medicine my mistakes are lives… more studying and more stress.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do for my mask, and even now I would need two, ten, or even forty more sessions to have my mask relay everything I wanted it to say. However, I understand that this was not the entire point of this exercise and that the goal was to find another way to work through the stress and in that, I was successful! (I only wish I could cash in its value more often)…
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