More on the premed curriculum

Great topic to cover. As an anthropology major in undergrad, I stumbled a bit with my early med school bio courses but got up to speed pretty quick. I feel my training in anthropology (both cultural and biological) has helped me greatly. I think your advocacy of psychology, philosophy/logic and ethics are great ideas, and would love to see them echoed in academia.

I think the idea of ‘weeding out’ with tougher premed courses is an important one to consider but I feel it probably plays a smaller role then many people assume.

DB, I know you will post soon about the pre-clinical medical school curriculum (years 1 and 2), but it’s hard to talk about one without mentioning the other.
Some responses to this post and the previous mention that the pre-med curriculum is necessary to prepare students for the pre-clinical curriculum. This may be true, but it assumes that the pre-clinical curriculum will remain unchanged. With the proposed changes to the liscenscing exams, this will likely not be the case.
In fact, you could keep pre-medical curriculum heavy in some sciences, but not sciences students will unlikey use such as organic chemistry. What if (in addition to logic and humanties which you have rightly suggested), pre-medical students started to learn biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, physiology, etc. BEFORE entering medical school? The 4 years of medical school could them be entirely clinically focused (of course with basic science reinforcement throughout all 4 years).
The 2 years of memorizing basic science facts, followed by two years of clinical work where many of these facts are simply forgotten just doesn’t make sence. Perhaps thinking about medical education as a process which starts in the pre-medical years makes more sense.

As far as I know, all schools nationally are required to have a biostatistics course in their curriculum. And it is, of course, tested on the boards. I think the days of “doctors who don’t understand anything about statistics” are largely due to the generation of doctors who went through medical school before these changes (although there were always some people who wouldn’t get it if you made them spend a year learning statistics).

Economics would be interesting, but I think you’d need a condensed 1 semester course because intro to macro/micro both go into some minutae that are unnecessary for medical practitioners.

Here at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Medicine, we have a term that might interest you – Bulimic Learning. Students stuff themselves with memorized facts, throw them up on the exam and starve for real knowledge. There are two things you can do to prevent this bad habit: 1. Identify clearly what medical students need to know instead of what professors want to teach. 2. Engage the students actively in learning. 3. Assess them on what they need to know to be physicians, not on their ability to memorize.