Recipes for medical education reform: will different ingredients create better doctors? A commentary on Sales and Schlaff.

摘要

Sales and Schlaffs article "Reforming Medical Education: A review and synthesis of five critiques of medical practice" (2010) in this issue of Social Science & Medicine examines five areas to demonstrate the inadequacy of current medical training programmes in the US. The authors argue that the critiques of medical practice offered up by quality, evidence based medicine (EBM), population medicine, health policy and heuristics can be synthesized to show that "medicine is practiced in a context of social and organizational structures distinct from its bio-medical substrate" (Sales & Schlaff, 2010). They propose that increasing physician training in the social sciences during medical school and residency will be an effective way to produce better physicians. In addition, they advocate for changes to medical admissions processes and pre-medical training to include assessment of broader attributes than facility in natural sciences, and a greater focus on critical thinking rather than memorization.