Category: medical school

Whispers of Vulnerability and Gratitude: Graduating Medical Students Share their Secrets

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By Trent Reed and Sunny Nakae

Many medical students struggle with fear, pride, priorities, regrets, and insecurities, but the liberty to disclose such feelings may be limited.  Students often avoid sharing their challenges and feelings with their peers for fear of looking weak or due to shame.  How can we destigmatize sharing among students to build resilience, foster community, and improve well-being?

A week prior to match day we received almost 70 anonymous secrets from our senior medical students at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.  Dr. Reed solicited these messages from the students by explaining the premise to them.  The exercise is based on the work of Frank Warren who created postsecret.com.  The students were not given guidance regarding topics or tone; they were simply asked to submit an anonymous secret…
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Tough Love for Your Personal Statement: Advice from a Medical School Dean

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By Sunny Nakae

The Stritch School of Medicine received 11,355 applications for 160 seats for the 2016-2017 season.  Thousands of applicants have the required coursework, strong grades and test scores.  The word is out that students need volunteer work, clinical exposure, leadership, and research in order to be competitive.  Every applicant submits a primary personal statement as well as responses to school-specific supplemental questions. As an admissions dean who reads hundreds of applications per year, I would like to offer some advice to all the premeds out there who are looking for a competitive edge: reflection is key to achieving and demonstrating personal growth…
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Loss: The Hidden Barrier to Professional Identity Formation

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By Meaghan P. Ruddy

Paying attention to the wider trends in medical education recently makes it difficult to miss the growing voice of Pamela Wible, MD and her crusade to end physician, resident and medical student suicides.  One premise of her argument is that all the language around burnout and resilience misses the point.  The point it misses? This demographic is suffering from abuse.

I tend to agree.  To this I would add that the result is not burnout but the closely related state of grief…
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DACA Medical Students- Making America Great Again!

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By Kimrey Van Perre

My friends have been called “courageous” for sharing their plight as undocumented students with the US Congress.  They have been called “DREAMers” due to the Dream Act that has been repeatedly introduced in Congress but never passed.  I call them “selfless” and “unrelenting” in their commitment to the medically underserved despite their uncertain legal status.

I am a 3rd year medical student at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (SSOM).  I am not a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) student.  I was born a US citizen.  But many of my friends at SSOM are DACA students.  Their families, like mine generations ago, immigrated to this country.  They wanted their children to have opportunities and to grow up in a safe and stable country…
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Stories from the Border: Hearing the Voice of All Community Members

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By Audrey Hertenstein

We shuffled through the metal detector and were directed to stand with our backs against a wall – the final step in an hour long process to enter the Florence, AZ Detention Center to visit with detainees the organization Mariposas sin Fronteras had been communicating with to offer assistances such as letters of community support and a friendly voice to reach out to.  The guards ushered me and the other Loyola students through several locked doors and into a visitation room where we were only allowed one hour to meet, rules which seemed much too strict for a person whose only crime had been seeking asylum within our borders…
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ICYMI: The Best of Reflective MedEd 2016

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With the holidays upon us, we are taking this opportunity to showcase a few excellent posts from the year gone by.  We invite you to check out these highly popular posts.

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Darrell G. Kirch, MD, “Educating for Resilience and Humanism in an Uncertain Time.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/09/27/educating-for-resilience-and-humanism-in-an-uncertain-time/

 

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Hedy Wald, PhD, “Becoming Zusha: Reflecting on Potential in Medical Education and Practice.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/03/09/becoming-zusha-reflecting/

 

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Sunny Nakae, PhD, “Presence and Vulnerability in Medical Education.” 
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/02/02/presence-and-vulnerability-in-medical-education/

 

Our Devices, Our Selves: How to Avoid Practicing Distracted Doctoring

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By Laura Vearrier

Americans check their phones an average of 46 times per day, (Eadicicco 2015) and they do so no matter what they are doing, including while driving, while at church, during sex, or out to dinner. (Rodriguez 2013) Are healthcare providers any different?  In a survey of medical students, 46 % reported texting, checking email, or making a call on their personal devices during a patient encounter, and 93% had seen a senior resident or attending do so. (Tran et al. 2014)  The answer to this problem is not as simple as turning off the device.  Improvements to medical care afforded by personal devices include efficient access to electronic text books, up-to-date literature, medical apps such as dosing calculators, and improved provider connectedness, among others.  The flip side is that the inevitable distraction created by smartphones creates a threat to professionalism in healthcare…
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