Search

Discusses the growing involvement between medical schools and medical industries and the ethical problems this situation poses. The main concern is that investigators may expose subjects to unnecessary risks because they are driven by financial motives. (SLD) more...

Analysis of the current status of Georgetown University (District of Columbia) finds a money-losing medical center and a limited endowment, but the institution retains its elite status and highly competitive admissions. Notes the respected medical and law schools, recent fund-raising success, its Catholic identity, management problems, and concerns about the rigor of its intellectual life (DB) more...

Drexel University (Pennsylvania) has agreed to manage Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, now known as MCP Hahnemann University (Pennsylvania) in a unique arrangement designed to save the latter institution from bankruptcy. Drexel will administer the institution until summer 2001, when it will decide to either merge or part ways. (MSE) more...

As nurse practitioners increasingly move into practice areas once reserved for primary-care physicians, and as medical schools move more toward general practice and primary care, medical and nursing students are competing for a limited number of slots in which they can receive on-the-job clinical instruction. With professional boundaries overlapping, confusion about roles and problems with cooperation have resulted. (MSE) more...

When students or recent graduates come to talk with Anthony M. Sozzo, an associate dean for student affairs at New York Medical College, about repaying their federal loans, he sometimes struggles with what to tell them. He states that the answers are increasingly being complicated by an ever-expanding federal loan-servicing system. The number of entities that service the loans owned by the federal government has risen sharply over the past several years, from one company in 2008 to 13 as of this month. Keeping up with the increase in servicers has been a challenge, financial-aid officers say, and at the individual-borrower level the changes are causing confusion over what borrowers are expected to pay and where they should go to manage their loans. With 13 companies now handling federal direct loans and more to come, aid administrators predict that the resulting inconsistencies will overwhelm borrowers. more...

Presents the report of the AAMC Panel on the General Professional Education of the Physician and College Preparation for Medicine concerning the purposes of a general professional education, clinical education, admissions, promoting independent learning, curriculum development, and faculty involvement. (MSE) more...

Describes how a rise in rates for medical malpractice insurance is forcing some physicians to suspend their practices, shrinking the pool of instructors for medical students. (EV)

Describes how the Latin American Medical School in Cuba attracts foreign students, including Americans, with a free course of study. Supporters say it shows Castro's commitment to humanitarian ideals, while critics see it as an attempt to curry favor with Central and Latin America. (EV) more...

Reports that Harvard University Medical School is considering policy changes that would ease financial restrictions in its conflict-of-interest standards for faculty researchers. Supporters argue that such changes are necessary to attract and retain top researchers, but ethicists warn that as collaborations between industry and academic medicine increasingly offer large financial rewards, medical schools should be more, not less, vigilant. (DB) more...

Reports that prominent medical professors are being solicited away from medical schools by large honoraria or high remuneration offered by commercial companies that provide continuing education services to physicians on the Internet. Suggests that medical schools consider potential partnerships with dot-com companies to develop continuing education programs that would help them retain their (often volunteer) continuing education faculty. (DB) more...

Two foreign medical schools plan to open branch campuses in the United States. Opponents, including the American Medical Association and a physician group, argue that allowing unaccredited medical schools to operate here could jeopardize health care. The two institutions are distinctly different: a for-profit school in the West Indies, and a Uganda-based nonprofit school specializing in tropical medicine. (MSE) more...

Increasingly, professional schools are addressing the issue of whether a financially successful program has a responsibility to support other, less financially successful programs, and how university fund raisers can assure donors that their gifts will benefit specific programs and not be siphoned into others. Law and business schools, often profitable, are frequently called on to support expensive medical centers. (MSE) more...

Programs guaranteeing college-bound high school students admission to medical school based on anticipated high college grades are now offered by 33 medical schools; some of the programs are 20-30 years old. Originally intended to make medical careers more attractive, the policy is now used more commonly to recruit high-achieving undergraduate students. Other professional schools offer similar programs. (MSE) more...

Meharry Medical College, a predominantly Black institution, is tackling financial and academic problems that have plagued it in recent years. Meharry has received city approval of a plan to share teaching facilities with Vanderbilt University at the city's publicly owned hospital. (MLW) more...

The American Association of University Professors may sanction five institutions for policies and practices concerning faculty criticism of church doctrine (Catholic University) or the administration (Alvernia College), tenure denial (State University of New York, Stonybrook, and New York University School of Medicine), and sex discrimination (Saint Leo College, Florida). (MSE) more...

Unlike the schools of old, where students spent two years focused on science and theory before they set foot in a hospital, new medical schools are integrating clinical care into the first two years. Existing schools have taken steps in this direction. But, says John E. Prescott, chief academic officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, "the new schools are moving the bar farther and faster in coming up with innovative ways to provide important clinical experiences early in medical education." In this article, the author looks at new or proposed schools at Hofstra, Florida International, and Rocky Vista Universities and how they are reconsidering the way physicians should be trained. more...

California's lieutenant governor has proposed a fast-track medical school that would shave three years off the training needed to become a physician. It is not the first time such an idea has been offered. The proposal, for a hoped-for medical school at the University of California at Merced, struck some medical educators as both unrealistic and unwise, drastically compressing the eight years it usually takes to earn an M.D. But a handful of medical schools have, for decades, offered six-year programs that combine undergraduate and graduate degrees to students who are in a hurry to become doctors. Accelerated options persist, their supporters say, because they offer a sensible solution for today's shrinking state budgets, soaring tuition, and looming doctor shortage. Given California's fiscal crisis and already announced cuts in higher education, it is unclear what chance a slimmed-down medical school has in the near future, although such conditions reinforce the need to come up with a more affordable model for medical education. more...

Two years ago, the only historically black medical school west of the Mississippi faced a grim prognosis after county officials pulled the plug on its relationship with a troubled hospital. Today the medical school that has reportedly trained about a third of Los Angeles County's black and Hispanic physicians is back on its feet and planning an ambitious expansion. This article reports on Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically black medical school that had lost its teaching hospital, and how the university plans to open its own four-year medical program. Even though California's economy has tanked, and the university still lacks an affiliated teaching hospital, it hopes to expand from a two-year to a four-year school over the next five years. Charles Drew University, which includes undergraduate and graduate allied health degrees, is also building a nursing school, slated to open this fall. According to Susan Kelly, the university's first female and first nonminority president, the university is a little, mission-driven place that wants to be recognized for providing the best care for the poorest people. Ms. Kelly, an Australian native whose 2006 appointment rankled many members of the predominantly black and Hispanic community surrounding the medical school, has disarmed critics with her fierce commitment to its mission of serving the underserved, as well as her sense of humor. more...

While the number of medical-school campuses in Arizona doubled--from two to four--in the last few years, there is no assurance that all of the new doctors they graduate will stick around to practice in the state. Medical schools here and nationwide are struggling to line up enough clinical-training slots so that an influx of new upper-level medical students will have somewhere to practice their skills. In many ways, the Phoenix area is a microcosm of what is happening nationally. Faced with the prospect that aging baby boomers may not have enough doctors to care for them, medical schools are expanding class sizes and opening new campuses. But the pipeline could remain clogged if they aren't able to find enough training sites. more...

This article reports that India's medical profession is in a crisis. For every 10,000 people in India there are only six doctors, compared with nearly 55 in the United States and nearly 21 in Canada. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. Professors are leaving medical schools for better-paying jobs in private hospitals and in the pharmaceutical industry, forcing the schools to cut the size of their programs. Students who would have studied medicine a generation ago are pursuing more-lucrative careers in the technical sector. The doctor shortage illustrates how government regulation and bureaucracy sometimes make it more difficult for India to meet the challenges that come with rapid economic growth. Regulatory hurdles to the establishment of private medical schools have limited the opportunities to train for careers in medicine, prompting would-be doctors to go abroad, despite a boom in private health care. Some students opt out of the field entirely. more...

Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with a bright career ahead of her--a trusted member of a research laboratory at the medical school studying the role of cell growth in diabetes. When an editor of "The Journal of Clinical Investigation" did a spot-check on one of her images for an article in 2005, Roovers' images were found to have been fabricated in order to support conclusions. As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity. The level of tampering they find is alarming. This article describes how new tools are helping journal editors detect manipulated images. more...

Cyril Naidoo, who directs the department of family medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, conducts workshops to traditional healers on how to help patients with AIDS and HIV. In Dr. Naidoo's workshop, the group discusses how to counsel patients about HIV and AIDS, how to refer them for testing, and then how to follow up with HIV-positive patients to ensure that they receive proper care and that the healers' own herbal remedies do not clash with the clinics' powerful and often toxic anti-retro-viral drugs. The healers have been learning about ideas that are alien to the way that they practice medicine: the existence of germs and viruses, the contribution of sexual practices to HIV's spread, and the ways in which viral loads and immune-system cell counts can be used to measure the progress of the disease. This article reports how the threat of HIV and AIDS has caused doctors like Cyril Naidoo and traditional healers to work together to stem the tide of death in their land. more...

The author advocates for less, rather than more, research on alternative medicine. From a historical perspective, there is little newsworthy about public infatuation with what Bausell terms pseudomedicine. What is new is the role of institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, who now awards both research and educational grants in alternative medicine, and medical schools that now work with complementary and alternative clinics, offer fellowships in alternative medicine, and both include material on alternative medicine in required courses and offer optional courses about it. While not attempting to dictate what academics should and should not be allowed to teach, or what they might and might not study, the author does believe that alternatives exist to compiling more and more evidence, which requires extensive experimental evaluation before formulating a plausible theory. The author describes personal research to test the broad hypothesis that therapeutic effects attributed to complementary and alternative medicine are basically nothing more than placebo and placebo-like effects. The logic used was: If there is a plausible biological explanation for why the placebo effect should occur, and credible experimental evidence that it does occur; but there is no plausible biological explanation for why any therapeutic effect from complementary or alternative medicine should exist, nor any credible experimental evidence that one does, which cannot also be attributed to the placebo effect; then a reasonable scientific conclusion would be that complementary and alternative therapies are nothing more than placebos. To evaluate the effectiveness of complementary and alternative therapies, the author looked at high-quality trials that controlled for the placebo effect, and that had been published since January 2000 in the four American medical journals not limited to a specific disease that had the highest citation rates; and also examined systematic reviews by a research organizations dedicated to locating, appraising, and synthesizing evidence regarding the effectiveness of specific medical interventions of all types, conventional and alternative, that included two or more trials evaluating the effectiveness of complementary or alternative medicine. Only one of the trials published in the four selected journals in more than seven years demonstrated an effect of alternative medicine beyond the placebo effect, a trial sponsored, conducted, and its publication written, by employees of the company that marketed the product in question. The research organization reviews were almost as definitely negative. Because there is little doubt that a placebo effect does exist, but little evidence to suggest that any complementary or alternative therapy is more effective than a placebo, the writer believes that an evidenced-supported answer can be addressed to the question of whether or not it is necessary to continue spending in excess of $100-million a year on alternative-medicine research to prove the obvious, that sometimes we do actually reach a point at which more research is not needed, and we have reached it with alternative and complementary therapies. Sometimes, in fact, certain types of research need never have been conducted in the first place. more...

This article reports that Canadian medical students, inspired by an online community and an obscure heart condition, have ditched their books and transformed their class notes into a pulsating, hip-hop music video. "Diagnosis Wenckebach"--the name comes from a type of abnormal heart rhythm--was created as just one of many innovative study tools by medical students at the University of Alberta, with the help of Homer, a recently unveiled online learning system. Homer is meant to conjure up images of the Greek poet as students set forth on "an epic journey of lifelong learning." Once students log in, they can link to their schedules, class notes, slides, online libraries, learning games, and journal articles with a single password, and also access their e-mail, Facebook, and other networking tools. What sets Homer apart from other online learning systems, like Blackboard, is that it gives students the chance to contribute their own quizzes, questions, and study tips. The system is a leading example of a new emphasis at medical schools, like those at Stanford and Wake Forest Universities, on interactive online learning and collaboration in a field that has historically been dominated by lectures and top-down instruction. more...

For more than half a century, the lucrative Detroit automobile industry drove Michigan's economy, providing the state with plenty of tax revenue to support its public colleges and universities. In recent years, however, the woes of the Big Three auto companies have caused state spending to plummet, resulting in cuts or minimal increases in the higher-education budget. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm and many lawmakers publicly acknowledge that the way out of this budget hole is to use higher education to transform the state's economy to one more dependent on knowledge-based industries. But paying for that transformation is proving harder than first thought. Michigan faces three big fiscal problems: the deficit for this fiscal year, another projected deficit next year, and the elimination of a major business tax -- which brings in $1.9-billion annually -- on December 31. Late in May, the governor and leaders of the Legislature reached a tentative agreement that would postpone a $73.3-million payment to higher education from August until the beginning of the next fiscal year, October 1. If the full Legislature approves the plan, meant to help close Michigan's $800-million budget shortfall for this fiscal year, the state will also delay the payment of an additional $29-million in funds to its community colleges. As part of her budget, Governor Granholm has proposed dividing Michigan's public universities into two groups in the budget process, so that lawmakers would handle appropriations for its three large research universities differently than for its smaller public universities. Many of the regional universities are voicing concern, viewing division of the budget process as a way to potentially finance the three universities with medical schools at a different level in the future. But the governor's proposal could be good news for the regional colleges, based on success of the University of California and California State University systems after their appropriationswere split in the 1960s. Splitting the appropriations may allow the flagship universities to act more like privately supported public universities, a trend that some see as most promising for universities' future prosperity. more...

The Association of Academic Health Centers and the Association of American Medical Colleges approved statements on conflicts of interest. University researchers are asked to disclose any significant personal, professional, or financial relationships, and faculty should not let commercially sponsored research interfere with the education of students. (MLW) more...

Rural areas have difficulty attracting physicians, and they also send fewer students to medical schools than do urban areas. A program at the University of Washington's medical school known as WAMI--for Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho--is trying to combat that problem. (MLW) more...

Johns Hopkins University has abandoned use of the Medical College Admission Test as a medical college admissions requirement in an effort to reestablish the validity of humanities in medical students' educational background and is encouraging other medical schools to make the test optional and underscore their support of general education. (MSE) more...

Medical education leaders find medical schools have failed to adapt programs to changing health care needs and are keeping enrollments high despite projected physician surpluses, favoring clinical work over teaching, overextending research efforts, and neglecting ambulatory care, cost containment, elderly care, and socieconomic factors of illness. (MSE) more...

College students aiming for medical school often fall victim to 'pre-med syndrome'; they become narrow, grade-conscious overachievers, who are less sociable and more interested in money and prestige than are most other students. Suggestions for alleviating the severity of the problem are provided. (MLW) more...

Factors related to the decline in applications for medical school include costs of medical education, student's desire to begin earning money quickly, publicity about the high cost of malpractice insurance and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the medical professions, and the perception that there is a continuing overabundance of doctors. (MLW) more...