Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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The language people use both makes possible and constrains the thoughts they can have. More than just a vehicle for ideas, language shapes ideas--and the practices that follow from them. Thus, in medical education, teaching students how to talk about medical cases also teaches them how to think about patients and medical work, and how to define their relationships to both. ⋯ Rhetoric is one science that can deepen understanding of communication and improve teaching of this clinical skill. Rhetoric systematically studies the relationships between communication and its effects, between how things are named and how they are experienced, between discourse and socialization. Bringing language to the foreground of education, rhetoric directs attention to the relationship between what medical students learn to say and what they learn to value, believe, and practice.
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The University of Michigan has a support program aimed at early identification, remedial plans, and appropriate academic accommodations for at-risk students in under-graduate colleges and graduate and professional schools. Since 1994, the medical school has formally taken part in this program. Medical students at risk for academic failure (e.g., repeated failure in academic course work, licensure examinations, clinical examinations) are automatically referred to their academic counselors in the Student Programs Office of the medical school. ⋯ During the first four years of the program, 28 medical students were identified through it; of these, 24 (86%) were underrepresented minorities. Most (21) were referred during the first and third years of the curriculum. After a range of services for a variety of problems, 26 (93%) of the 28 students either graduated or continued to progress in their studies; the other two left the medical school for academic reasons.
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To develop a job-satisfaction measure that encompasses the multifaceted job of internal medicine residency program directors. ⋯ The authors have developed a new facet-specific job-satisfaction measure that is reliable and valid for assessing the job satisfaction of internal medicine program directors. Because job descriptions for program directors in other specialties are similar, it may also be useful in these populations.
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Journal editors are among those who must face the issue of when and how to correct the scientific literature when an allegation or finding of scientific misconduct occurs. The author describes an instructive incident of tainted data and a subsequent allegation of misconduct that involved a federally-sponsored study where some data had been fabricated. ⋯ The author concludes that the record shows how disconnected journal editors have been from the scientific misconduct process and that expectations differ regarding the obligations of authors, research institutions, and federal agencies about informing a journal when an allegation of scientific misconduct is made about a publication in its pages. The 25 cases show that substantial delays in notifying the journal and the public about allegations and findings of scientific misconduct are endemic, and that all parties have far to go in appreciating their roles in maintaining the integrity of the biomedical literature.