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Future of Medicine | Medical Education | Medical Ethics | Premedical | Science

On Admitting Nice, Ethically-Minded People to Med School

This week the Times ran a leading story on a new med school admission process, with mul­tiple, mini-​​​​interviews, like speed dating. The idea is to assess appli­cants’ social, com­mu­ni­cation and ethical thinking (?) skills:

…It is called the mul­tiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States — including those at Stanford, the Uni­versity of Cal­i­fornia, Los Angeles, and the Uni­versity of Cincinnati — and 13 in Canada are using it.

At Vir­ginia Tech Car­ilion, 26 can­di­dates showed up on a Sat­urday in March and stood with their backs to the doors of 26 small rooms. When a bell sounded, the appli­cants spun around and read a sheet of paper taped to the door that described an ethical conundrum. Two minutes later, the bell sounded again and the appli­cants charged into the small rooms and found an inter­viewer waiting. A chorus of cheerful greetings rang out, and the

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Future of Medicine | Ideas | Medical Education | Premedical | Science

TV Meets Real Life Oncology, and Anticipating the MCATs

Yes­terday I wrote on some tough deci­sions facing a TV show’s pro­tag­onist. She’s got metastatic melanoma and might par­tic­ipate in a clinical trial when the show resumes.

Now imagine you’re an oncol­ogist, or a real patient with this killing disease — you really need to be on top of new devel­op­ments, to under­stand the pros and cons, because someone’s life depends on it.

If you’re the doctor in the rela­tionship, you need keep abreast of current infor­mation for all the other tumors types of patients in your care: what are the new findings, if any, what are the lim­i­ta­tions of the data. You need to know how the advances apply to an indi­vidual person who, most likely, has another con­dition or two, like high blood pressure or, say, osteoporosis.

Oncol­o­gists ought to be familiar with new drugs, and how those compare to old ones, and the side effects, and the dis­tinc­tions between tumors with

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