Big News!

I’ve been holding onto this piece of news for a while now, but I’m finally ready to unveil it! The Biopsy is moving to its new home on Tumblr!

Check it out here: www.thebiopsy.com

This WordPress site will no longer be used for my blog posts, though it will stick around for reference. I’ll be porting over a lot of my old posts to this new site, so you won’t have to bother coming here anymore.

If you are still interested in receiving email updates from my new blog, you have one of two options. Your first option is to register with Tumblr and follow my blog directly. Your second option is to access my new Feed burner RSS feed. You can access that by clicking here.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think of the new blog!

Uncoupling Institutional Medical Education

I recently came across the Twitter hashtag #FOAMed. Though images of bubble baths came to mind, I did a quick search and found out it actually represents “Free Open Access Medical Education“. Reading through what resources I could find, FOAMed actually started making a lot of sense.

First, some facts:

1. Medical education is long and expensive endeavor, with students graduating with debt equivalent to a small mortgage.
2. The style of medical education often depends on the institution offering it, and one size never fits all.
3. We need more doctors (and health care professionals in general) to make the pending shortage less acute. Moreover, GME funding hangs in the balance as our national budget reckons with reality.

Why FOAMed?

If the proliferation of Internet-based courses from elite universities is any indication, online education is increasingly gaining traction and validity. All the information traditionally available in the lecture hall can be accessed through asynchronous learning networks that often cater to varied learning preferences.

“Premed” in a Digital Age

Sometimes, I ask myself what it means to be a “premed”.

One might say that the label connotes a desire to become a physician, as its root, pre-MD, would suggest. We strive to matriculate into medical schools the best way we know how, which is to say, how our exemplars did before us. We’re told of medical missionaries, like Mother Theresa or Florence Nightingale, who dedicated their lives to service. We read of research geniuses, both new, like Craig Venter, and old, like Semmelweis, who brought about paradigm shifts in medicine.

And so, we college premeds volunteer, research, and strive for good grades. We have our individual motivations for doing each, each of which is worthy and noble in its own right, but the pattern is consistent; we gain experiences based on the model of a 20th century doctor who practices at the lab bench and clinic.

We live in a digital age, where computing technology is on the verge of making greater, and more frequent, impacts on health and its care than the average volunteer or researcher could in a lifetime. Before people get up in arms about their traditional experiences, let me clarify by saying that they are still necessary. They provide a certain value central to being a doctor. Where would medicine be without its pioneering researchers and volunteers?