Needed Changes in Medical School and Pre-Med Curricula

Quoted from Santana S: Educators seek curriculum revision to reflect changes in sciences, Reporter 13 No. 11, p. 8-9, August 2004, Association of American Medical Colleges.

• Medical schools should require mastery of holistic concepts such as the scientific method at the premedical school level ... some of the material currently taught in medical school could be covered at the undergraduate level to create space in the medical school curricula for updated content, according to C Darrell Jennings, Dean of Academic Affairs, University of Kentucky Medical Center
• Whereas some are calling for more coverage of the new sciences and technologies - such as the latest genetics findings - at the college level, Susan Rattner, MD, associate dean of undergraduate medical education at Jefferson University School of Medicine, thinks that too much focus on individual scientific disciplines before medical school is not the best policy. Instead, she favors the traditional approach that emphasizes flexibility in selecting a course of study during the undergraduate years. "If we are going to be teaching students genetics and other sciences when they get to medical school, why should we spend any time going deeply into genetics before they come to medical school? ... I have a personal bias against doing medical school in college and then doing it again when you go to medical school. There are a lot of other things to learn before you get here. College students are still exploring their world."
• Medical schools should work in partnerships with colleges, according to Malcolm Cox, Dean for Medical Education, Harvard Medical School.
• The National Academy of Sciences report Bio2010: Transforming Undergradudate Education for Future Research Biologists argued that the undergraduate experience in biology is not reflective of how biologists design, perform, and analyze experiments. "Biological concepts and models are becoming more quantitative, and biological research has become critically dependent on concepts and methods drawn from other scientific disciplines ... The connections between the biological sciences and the physical sciences, mathematics and computer sciences are rapidly becoming deeper and more extensive."