Sessions

A buffet of educational sessions at this year's convention offered just about everyone something clinical, political and philosophical to sample. Here are just a few of the highlights.

LEVELING DISPARITIES REQUIRES SOMETHING BOLD

Aranthan Jones, aide to Rep. Donna Christian-Christiensen (D-Virgin Islands) and senior policy adviser for the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust, came from a busy morning on Capitol Hill to speak to students about health-care disparities.

The Hill is a very incestuous place, he explained, and innovative ideas don't get into the circle of power easily-or cheaply. With public-health cuts and high student debt deterring physicians from working in underserved areas, something bold has to happen in Congress. The majority of those on the Hill don't have a health-care background, so it's important that health professionals get more involved in their government. "Everything you will do will be controlled by these people," Jones said, from the kinds of patients physicians see to the loans that pay for medical education.

Public health has been underfunded for two decades, Jones added, and today, so much public health funding is being poured into bioterror threats that chronic disease goes virtually ignored.

SURGEONS AT WAR WITH GANG VIOLENCE

Trauma surgeons have a responsibility to prevent violence outside the operating room, said Dr. Edward E. Cornwell III, chief of the adult trauma service at Johns Hopkins Hospital and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "We're saving the people who get to the hospital alive," but that doesn't help the ones who get to the hospital dead, he pointed out.

Cornwell himself serves as a mentor to youth through the Police Athletic League. To tarnish the glamour of a "culture of violence," he shows adolescents graphic slides of gunshot victims.

Trauma surgeons don't see every gunshot victim, so other physicians have to step in to address what he calls the "psychosocial dysfunction" of gang culture. Only violence prevention can reduce mortality further, and what better group to tackle this problem than physicians "who have a passion for what they do?"

INVISIBLE STUDENTS

"They simply don't take people like you," Dr. Maria Schwartz recalls hearing at several points along her bumpy medical education path. Now a senior resident in the Mayo Clinic's physical medicine and rehabilitation department, Schwartz related the challenges of her cerebral palsy, small and large-from putting on exam gloves to working through the admissions and interview process. "You could…see their jaws drop to the floor," she said of interviewers meeting her for the first time.

Schwartz also shared her frustration with a culture that seems to ignore the presence of others like her. Facts and figures about medical students with disabilities are few, and her own efforts to probe medical schools' admissions policies came up short-of the 150 schools she contacted, only 39 have responded. "It is difficult to prove these disparities when you can't get people to return a survey," she noted.

BREAKING THE SILENCE

"We really need to move reproductive health education into mainstream required education," said Harvard University School of Medicine fourth-year Angel Foster, Ph.D. As past president of Medical Students for Choice, Foster surveyed 54 North American medical schools in 2002 and 2003 and found that while 90 percent cover contraception in some way, emergency contraception and IUD information was lacking in 30 percent, and schools give an average two hours to the topic in preclinical years. Abortion fared worse in the survey, with the majority of schools (61 percent) spending 30 minutes or less on the topic. "More schools include information on Viagra than include information on abortion," Foster said.

Convention attendees were able to make up for that education deficit with other sessions devoted to learning about the clinical abortion procedure and discussing and clarifying their personal values on the subject.

SPIN SCHOOL

"[Journalists] are hungry for a professional opinion," said Mary Jo Dales, editor-in-chief of International Medical News Group. And that's where physicians and medical students come in, agreed a panel of journalists gathered to discuss media messages. It's a symbiotic relationship: Journalists will seek out medical experts to make sense of the science, but medicine can use the media to get out the truth.

"Patients will read articles in magazines and newspapers and bring them to their physicians. You have to think about this: Are any of your professors, your pharmacology instructors, using the Wall Street Journal?" asked The Medical Letter editor Gene Carbona. "You guys need to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction."

That ability to see the difference can help in the clinical world, too. "I would caution that you need to be skeptical even about what's in your medical journals," added Elizabeth Connor of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

2005 Convention Recap