BouncingBabyBoomer.com

How Would You Do in 21st Century Med School?

There is a lot of talk these days about empowering patients to observe their own treatments and be their own advocates. This is supposed to give us a safety net and and reality check in a health care system that is increasingly stressed and error prone.

Somehow I doubt that Joe Doe Patient feels so empowered yet.

Since long before Drs. Kildare and Welby, there has been a mystical veil around matters medical. Doctors belonged to a rarefied order with its own language and rituals that only the most robust of minds could enter. It all left a lasting impression in the minds of many observers that mere mortals should not aspire to become physicians.

 

So what would you think here in 2008 if I told you that I was going to take a group of high school frosh and sophs with no prior training in science, and run them through a first year med school course in the pathology of disease?

What would you predict? Would you expect them all to flunk, or perhaps a few to at least earn a C, or maybe an eager beaver or two to earn an A or B? 

Keep on reading to see.

Prodding Us Into Swing-Voting Pens

Vilified. Victimized. Sanctified. Stratified.

We have become so "niche-i-fied" that any wedge will do when a politician needs another way to exploit a difference between me and you.

What used to seem like a statistician's insight has morphed into a cheerleading strategy that helps to frame sound bites in stadiums and pot shots in debates. Throwaway tags like "Joe the Plumber" are used to mobilize disposable interest groups that just might become swing votes in swing states if persuaded they had the power.

It is not the people driving the polls; it is the pols prodding us in to convenient cattle pens.

Call me naive, but I used to think it worked the opposite way when perhaps it never did.

Upbeats in Downtimes

 I just added a new theme to my tags: Upbeats in Downtimes. It's about seeking bits of hope between all the discouraging headlines. Getting past the Wall St. mess, however long it takes, will have a whole lot to do with sustaining hope and restoring confidence.

My first nominee for this new tag goes to the white-boarding "Fast Draw Team" on CBS Sunday Morning. Today's vignette was about "Market Monsters" and how to face them down. Very clever. As the FD fellows suggest, if you dump a stock or a fund, that money is gone and you're just out of luck. But if you hold on, there still is at least a chance that it will come back.

To anyone of Boomer age, this has to feel like Deja Vu All Over Again.

The Thoughts in a Box That Can Kill Us

I am only half-way into this book but I can't say enough good things about it. This could as easily have been called "How Engineers Think" or "How Professors Think"  since many of the same dynamics apply to anyone who absorbs a large body of knowledge and needs to apply it flexibly under real world conditions. However if a physician gets overly stuck inside a logic box it runs a real risk of killing someone. This issue is tackled head on by Jerome Groopman MD who also writes on matters medical for the New Yorker. In this book, he gives us an intimate, accessible glimpse into the minds of doctors, explaining the most common mistakes a physician might make. In this era of soaring medical error rates, everyone with a pulse should check out this book before their next checkup.

Title: How Doctors Think (click on the title to jump to the Amazon page)
Author: Jerome Groopman MD
Publisher: Mariner Books; (March 12, 2008)
Author's site: www.jeromegroopman.com

Double Homer for Brooks & Krugman

Spotlight NYT: Two recent columns are "must reads" for anyone who likes to keep the thinking lobes of their brains engaged. Both are steeped in insight and irony of the kind a Boomer might like, and together the two neatly bookmark each pole of the American spectrum that runs from over- to under-thinking.

In the first piece, Paul Krugman deftly skewers the new cult of know-nohing politics and the people who think too little. In the second hit of this double header, David Brooks lampoons the "social pseud" who wants to appear as if he thinks so much, you could never keep up.

Follow the story jump for links and detail.

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