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- THE WEEK, Page 27MISCELLANYWhat's Up, Doc?
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- Patients like to believe that doctors are at least passingly
- familiar with the medical texts that line their offices. Not so,
- says a report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine. A
- study of the reading habits of second-year medical students at
- the University of Southern California found that most coped with
- 22,000 pages of required and recommended reading by ignoring the
- bulk of it.
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- According to Dr. Clive Taylor, the reading time expected
- of a U.S.C. medical student is roughly 71 hours a week. Actual
- reading time is closer to six hours. Though one diligent
- student in the survey did spend 15 hours a week hitting the
- books, four confessed to having done no reading whatsoever.
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- Taylor is sympathetic to the students. The problem, he
- says, is not ill-prepared doctors but professors trying to cram
- an explosion of medical knowledge into a fixed four-year
- program of study. His prescription: "If we add anything further
- to the medical curriculum, let it be spare time."
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