What Should Medical Students Learn?

Let them know that they do not “give/write orders” Medicine is not a military command. The patient makes the final decisions. Remind them that they are there to offer expertise on diagnosis and treatment options and they must take the time to make certain that patients/advocates understand clearly what options are available to them and the pros/cons/costs of all the options.

Be on time for appointments. Be available when patients are in the hospital.

If they want patients who have money/insurance they will have to accomodate some aspects of custome service in their medical care regimen. They must treat patients, not disease.

Steve has covered many important points.

Also please tell them to remember that medicine is a helping profession, and to examine their own motivation for becoming doctors to be sure they are aligned with that basic fact.

Please ask them to treat every individual patient with dignity and respect, imagining their attitude if that patient was their own loved one: parent, grandparent, child, brother, sister, or spouse.

Good luck, Trisha – looking forward to hearing how it went.

Remind them that –
1. Patients should not be expected, as some say, to “give up their modesty” when entering the hospital or clinic. Patient modesty is associated with respect and dignity and is an essential aspect of individual value systems and these need to be respect.
2. For some patients, gender matters, especially with intimate procedures and exams. Some women would prefer female caregivers, some men would prefer male caregivers. Medical staff should not “assume,” just because a patient doesn’t speak and let his/her preferences known, that everything just fine. Ask. Question. You’re often taught that there are really no male or female doctors or nurses. Just doctors or nurses. Certainly when lives are immediately at stake that’s true. But that’s not everything that you do.
3. Don’t assume men have less modesty needs or gender preferences than women do. Ask.
4. Don’t play the “chaperone” game. If the chaperone is for your protection, admit it. Don’t just thrust chaperones upon patients, pretending they’re for patient comfort, especially if there’s only one gender chaperone available. If you as a medical professional don’t feel comfortable examining opposite gender patients without a chaperone, at least admit it to the patient. Don’t pretend the chaperone is there for them.
5. Never forget that your world, the world of the hospital, is not the real world. It’s not where most of us live. You have strange policies and rules and regulations there that are totally alien to many patients. You get used to them after years of work there. For patients, especially patients new to the system, hospitals are like different planets. Explain things. Talk. Communicate. Don’t assume too much about what patients already know, want to know, or value personally. Ask.

Interesting to see these comments, as I’m a first year medical student myself. But most of the ideas people are listing here and on the published submissions page are already in the curriculum, at least at the school I’m attending. There are numerous required seminars on how to establish empathy and effective communication with patients, and most of my fellow students are enthusiastic about and interested in this subject and actively seek out opportunities to understand these points of view. So I am sure that these speeches will be well received anyway, but I wonder if the real problem is that these ideas might be lost over time for new doctors when they begin residency and clinical practice. There isn’t a whole lot of opportunity for us to apply lessons on empathy and communication in real life and (thus cement them) when we’re still in medical school, especially at the preclinical level and when there’s a huge amount of other material that needs to be taken in. I wonder if it might be more effective to try to target residents and new doctors with initiatives like this rather than medical students who are still largely living within the four walls of a university.

I think there are some good suggestions above. I decided I would like to make my suggestion is on a personal note – with respect to all the information and training they receive, try to remember that any given patient may very well “know” their body better than any doctor might. What I mean is that I understand that while some patients might be a little hypochondriac (or come across as such), there will also be people they encounter that insist something is wrong and really do have a problem and being dismissive of that can have pretty serious consequences. Also, perhaps if doctors cannot be helpful, they can at least be not abusive. Showing just a modicum of respect for another person isn’t really that hard, it’s also considered professional.

I say this because in the past few years, my personal experience with the medical profession overall has been anywhere from negligent or dismissive to outright abusive (verbally and otherwise). Not that I felt anything was particularly wrong, I just knew something wasn’t right. I had horrible blood loss and doubling-over pain, to say the least of it. It took me YEARS to find a doctor who actually took seriously my quality of life enough to order just one simple, inexpensive radiology exam. Sadly, at this stage in the game, the news is not good and I’m about to face one of the hardest things/choices many people twice my age will never face. I’m somewhat relieved that I finally know what’s happening, but I have already lost over 5 years of my life, job, friends, etc. to the problem and its symptoms… and I don’t even know how it’s going to turn out yet. It angers me that getting to where I am now was so unnecessary, this could have been discovered and treated many years ago with far less possibly dire consequences if only someone had actually listened.