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- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!rutgers!rochester!fulk
- From: fulk@cs.rochester.edu (Mark Fulk)
- Newsgroups: sci.research
- Subject: Re: Medics as scientists ?
- Message-ID: <1992Sep1.150036.23048@cs.rochester.edu>
- Date: 1 Sep 92 15:00:36 GMT
- References: <1992Aug28.202346.10727@maths.tcd.ie> <1992Aug31.150746.19608@cs.rochester.edu> <16285@pitt.UUCP>
- Organization: Computer Science Department University of Rochester
- Lines: 37
-
- In article <16285@pitt.UUCP> km@cs.pitt.edu (Ken Mitchum) writes:
-
- >>I wrote that the first two years of med school involved mostly
- >>large-scale memorization.
-
- >This is not really correct. Memorization is important in medical school,
- >but only in certain courses, and as an adjunct to other course material.
- >It is very important in anatomy and neuroanatomy for example. But it is
- >of far less importance in a subject like physiology, where the
- >emphasis is on function. Some subjects, such as pathology, are a
- >fairly even mixture of the two.
-
- Other doctor friends seem to think that physiology, even, is a matter
- of memorization. I can imagine two explanations: either they don't
- have your insight into physiological function, and consequently don't
- see physiology as being as logically structured as you do, or perhaps
- their medical training was inferior. I can easily believe either
- explanation. For a parallel: I thought that calculus was a lark,
- never memorized anything, and rederived the facts I needed on-line
- during the exams. Less mathematical friends found the same course
- to be a boring exercise in memorization. They never saw how it all
- fit together.
-
- >Even the "rote" memorization in medical school serves a useful purpose
- >later. Very few of us remember a lot of the detail we learned in
- >anatomy, but we did learn how to remember things!
- ...
- >have over a thousand patients, but if one of them calls me up I look
- >pretty stupid if I don't remember the case.
-
- My point wasn't to criticize medical training. I think it is fairly
- well targeted for the set of skills that is being taught, as far as
- I can judge from this distance. I was just arguing that it is distinct
- from training for scientific research.
- --
- Mark A. Fulk University of Rochester
- Computer Science Department fulk@cs.rochester.edu
-