American Medical Student Association

A few months ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Matthew Stull, AMSA National Education & Research Fellow about new programming during convention. He discussed the vision for a new “New Thought Leaders” series of talks to provide more opportunity to hear from a broader range of leading voices within the profession of medicine.

The theme of compassion was elaborated on by two other presenters during AMSA's Annual Convention & Exposition – Jack Coulehan’s session “The Patient is Why I’m Here: Humility and Professionalism in Medical Training” and Allan Peterkin’s “Creative Writing for Teaching and Evaluating Professionalism”.

Scott Hagan
Vanderbilt School of Medicine, Class of 2013
Dr. Danny Sands, President of the Society for Participatory Medicine and Director of Medical Informatics at Cisco Internet Business Solutions, gave a great presentation (slideshow available here) on the use of emerging technologies to improve patient-physician communication in healthcare on Saturday, March 12th at the AMSA Annual Convention & Exposition. Some particular points that I found intriguing:

Aliye Runyan

When I start medical school, I fear that I will lose my balance between myself and my work in the pages of my anatomy book, I fear that I will forget the humanity of my patients in between the cuts of my dissections, and I fear I will listen more to my patients but hear less the pain in their voices, their need for compassion. During a session at AMSA's Annual Convention, Dr Coulehan reveals that these fears are common among medical students and not unfounded. It is exactly these elements especially the training of a doctor to be objective rather than empathic that have been taught in medical schools over the past fifty years especially, the philosophy of detached concern. However, research by prominent medical educators has shown this philosophy engenders self-absorption, rigidity, and even a sense of entitlement among physicians, leading to masochistic culture of arrogance, gamesmanship, and to some sense an inadequacy to heal.

In other words, exactly opposite of what make physicians really effective with their patients and legitimately capable of wielding the responsibilities of being a healer. Above all, physicians needs to have intellectual virtues like excellence, practical wisdom, and life-long learning, and moral virtues like integrity, fidelity, compassion, courage, humility, and justice. And, everyone knows this. Everyone knows the qualities it takes to make a good physician, in someone’s immortal words “firmness of mind” and “gentle and humane temper”. Yet, there is a great gap between what medical professionals know and what they are observed to do when it comes to these softer skills, a disparity which is eroding the very foundations of medicine.

So, what can we do to maintain compassion? How do we unite tenderness with steadiness? How do we help medical students develop a personal moral balance? For Dr Coulehan, there’s one way that works for medical students: taking time out formally in a small group format to think, to discuss, and to write about the medical school and residency experience.

The medical schools admissions deans didn’t seem to me at all that terrifying. But someday, these four people, two from MD schools and two from DO schools, might hold my fragile dreams in their hands, weighing all they know of me to make a decision. The decision for admission. However, they were eager to share with us some vital tips, some common and some less common and more sincere, on what the premedical students should strive to be and on what medical schools look for in applicants.

After a jolt of caffeine, I was ready to engage in the health care reform debate in AMSA’s “On the Hot Seat: Health Policy Experts Debate.” However, what I found there was more hand waving and ideological entrenchment than actual reform.