By Richard Colgan, M.D.
Director of Medical Student Education
Department of Family and Community Medicine
Editor’s Note: Dr. Colgan is the author of “Advice to the Young Physician: On the Art of Medicine.”
Medical students and residents at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Medical Center are learning lessons from some great doctors — most of whom have been dead for hundreds of years.
Third-year students rotating through the Department of Family and Community Medicine’s Family Medicine Clerkship are being taught how to make the transition from technician to healers by learning about some of history’s greatest physician educators. These include Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, Schweitzer and others. Such tips as, “If you listen to the patient, they will tell you the diagnosis,” are emphasized to these soon-to-be doctors of medicine.
Students are taught that looking for the patient’s unique “story” or “poetry of life” will sustain them and help them to become better doctors. The art of medicine is best learned by working alongside a senior mentor, but these students are also looking back to some of the teachings of medicine’s greatest educators to help them learn how to improve their relationships with their patients.
In an age when science has advanced by leaps and bounds, high tech is being complemented by “high touch.” By looking to the past, we hope to teach students and young physicians what some of the giants of medicine have practiced: that, in the final analysis, what matters most is focusing on the patient. Or, in the words of Francis Peabody, that “the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
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sometimes working employees are also patients— and need gentle treatment
good patient care automatic results from well treated care takers!
UMMS is progressing tremendously thru C2X program
I salute UMMS as an employee!
Having had a recent experience with my daughter being in the NICU at UMMC, I couldn’t agree more. Medical students and young residents need to develop better communication skills and that starts by listening better and respecting the family point view.
As a patient for now over a year dealing with breast cancer, treatment and surgeries the main thing I want to stress to new residents is pain control. Stop talking to me like I am drug seeking and stop telling me I just need to be repositioned. Treat my pain. If I tell you what works and believe me after 5 major surgeries in less than a year, I know what works, do it. Look for signs of pain, if my heart rate is in the 140′s and my BP is elevated and my face has a grimace, its pain. Don’t chase it, prevent it.
Even here in the Philippines, the trend is towards a patient-directed treatment protocol. I had the privilege of experiencing the best professional care of radiation technologists at the University of Perpetual Help Dalta Medical Center – Las Pinas City in the course of my 30-day External Beam Radiation Therapy.