Subaqua Sternal Rubs

Must be those kilts…

LONDON (Reuters) - Forty percent of medical students in Scotland believe they could justify having sex with a patient, according to a poll published on Tuesday.

In a small study of 62 students reported in the Journal of Medical Ethics, the students said it would be acceptable in certain situations.

"The issue of sexual relationships between doctors and former patients remains an area of debate among the medical profession," said Dr John Goldie, of the University of Glasgow, who conducted the survey.

He and his colleagues questioned medical students in Glasgow four different times during their medical training and asked how they would react in certain situations.

In one scenario the students were asked if they would accept an invitation to dinner from a patient who was finishing a lengthy treatment if they were the only doctor on a small, remote Scottish island.

Sixty percent said they would decline because it would be unethical and would compromise the doctor-patient relationship.

But the remaining students said they would accept because they thought they could keep their public and private lives separate or due to the difficulty of meeting someone in such an isolated place.

More at: Yahoo News

Sounds like a great new initiative to put humanism back in health care… right up to the point where student doctors sit in the waiting room with their patients. Surely, this is not the best use of the time of an extremely busy med student?

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) — Carolyn Casey's pager jolted her awake in wee hours of the morning: One of the Harvard medical student's patients had checked into the hospital and needed a Caesarean section. Casey rushed off, arriving just in time to help deliver her first baby.

Later, Casey visited the mother, Camila Santans, newborn Matthew and other family members in their room at The Cambridge Hospital, talking with them about breast-feeding and the gestational diabetes that had complicated the pregnancy. In the coming weeks, Casey will accompany Santans to follow-up appointments and checkups with Matthew's pediatrician.

It's all the kind of attentive, hands-on experience many assume is typical in a doctor's training. In fact, it's exceedingly rare.

At Harvard Medical School, as elsewhere, most students will see a dozen births or more during a three-week obstetrics rotation, but they rarely will meet a mother before she arrives at the hospital, or see her again once she leaves. On other rotations, they may see acutely ill cancer patients, but they may not be there to break the news, or follow them and their illnesses over a course of chemotherapy.

If the patients have specialist appointments, the students accompany them, even sitting with them in the waiting room. If they need surgery, students observe and assist. In some cases, they visit patients at home. And if patients die, as has already happened in the early months of the program, students will be there for that, too.

Read more at CNN.com - Hands-on training for med students - Sep 27, 2004

Via the Boston Herald:

A growing number of students, especially women, are interested in becoming doctors, reversing a seven-year downward trend, according to a review of medical school applications in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Nationally, 35,000 students submitted applications for the class that started in 2003, a 3.5 percent increase over the previous year, according to the review by the American Medical Association. The increase was the first since 1996 and driven largely by women, who accounted for 96 percent of the gain.

This is good, because we are going to need more doctors, especially in EM if patients like the one who just found my site with this search come into the ED for their "medical emergencies"….

Hey it's from 1989… but I just found it on the internet, and it's still true today…

The Art of Pimping
by Frederick L. Brancati, MD, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh.
From JAMA 262(1):89, July 7, 1989.

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It's hard work becoming a revered attending physician in a university hospital. The task daunts the newly appointed junior attending as he strides down the corridor of his first ward with his first team. Oh, he's made some changes in anticipation of his new position. He's wearing a long coat now, an all-cotton coat with razor-sharp creases and knit buttons. The stained, shrunken polyester white pants and tennis shoes have given way to gray, light wool slacks with a cuff and polished loafers. Framed certificates bear testimony to his intelligence and determination. He should be ready to take the helm of his ward team, but he's not. Something's missing, something important, something closer to art than to science. When physicians talk about the "art of medicine" they usually mean healing, or coping with uncertainty, or calculating their federal income taxes. But there's one art this new attending needs to learn before all others: the art of pimping.

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