The Medical School Curriculae You Don't Get To Hear About!

"Besides medical school, there is probably no other four-year experience - unless it be four year's service in a war - that can so change the cognitive content of one's mind and the nature of one's relationships with others." F.D. Moorse, Harvard Medical School

Introducing a shocking, online book by Michael Greger MD, Heart Failure - Diary of a Third Year Medical Student A personal account of medical university.

"I just graduated with honours from Tufts University School of Medicine, the class of 1999. I don't feel honourable, though. I have become disillusioned - disgusted even - by medical training and medicine as a whole. I want to help others dispel their illusions as well. Medical school is four years long. The first two years are basic science lectures, more like an extension of college. The last two years, however, third year and fourth year, involve rotations through hospitals." "One of the few statements with which most physicians would agree," one doctor writes, "is that the third year, the year on the wards, is the critical year in medical education." Another contends "in no year of their adult lives, do students change so much as during the third year of medical school."

This is my story of third year, the worst year of my life. For many students, who - like me - have had no prior clinical experience, third year is the first real contact with medicine, the first taste of what doctors really do, what doctors are really like. I saw medicine as a humanistic career of intimacy - helping people, sharing, caring for people. But what I found was a profession that didn't even seem to care about people. No one around me seemed to question what was happening to them, to the patients, to all of us."

More at http://upalumni.org/medschool/preface.html

Full book at http://upalumni.org/medschool/

CTM COMMENT: The pages in this book give good insight into the transformation that takes place in the pre-med mind. Patients metamorphose into machines, without feeling, that need mechanical attention only. Soul and spirit are separated from the physical. The doctor is then able to diagnose, categorise and surmise without feeling. This keeps him sane. Or does it? Dr Greger asks for a $20.00 donation. We think he deserves it. Please support him in his stance to tell another side.