Perspectives in biology and medicine
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The Internet is revolutionizing medical education and medical practice by enabling teachers and students to utilize and integrate many forms of data in ways that cannot be done via classic textbooks. In cardiovascular medicine, dynamic images are essential for understanding cardiac function, coronary anatomy, and myocardial perfusion, as well as for learning cardiovascular pathophysiology and the typical and atypical presentations of disease states. Cardiosource, an educational Web site developed by the American College of Cardiology, illustrates the ways in which the Internet is being used to improve medical education and practice.
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Empathy is a highly desirable trait in a physician, but the term means different things to different people. Rather than focus on empathy, it may be more fruitful to consider the individual ingredients of a successful patient-physician engagement: scientific competency, imagination (the basis of empathy), caring about the patient, attentive (nonjudgmental) listening to the person's story, and skill in rewriting the illness story. The cardinal skill, on a sound base of scientific competence, is imagination. A successful engagement has beneficial consequences for physicians as well as patients.
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We present the medical students' perspective on the hotly contested topic of professionalism in medical education and explore why students are often hostile to education in professionalism. We then suggest ways to improve professionalism education in the medical curriculum.