Slashdot Mirror
Organizers Plan Online Medical School
slashdot_commentator writes "Job has you down? Thinking of starting a second career? How about finally getting that medical degree you've been putting off? A group of more than 50 schools in 16 countries are working to create an online medical school, in part to combat the "brain drain" that occurs when medical students go abroad for their education but do not return later. ... Organizers said that because degrees would be granted by individual participating schools, all of which are accredited, students should not have to worry about accreditation problems."
As I recall, right in the middle of the dot-com boom Microsoft started an online, collaborative center for Medical education by buying out a bunch of sites. It was called the "MSN Healing Zone" and didn't last for very long...
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What happens when you outlaw guns
Online schools deprive you of needed experience and interaction -- and that's particularly bad for the field of medicine, which requires LOTS of hands-on experience. Even worse than cassette tape courses at colleges, online degrees in general are a joke that the vast, vast majority of people flunk out of or quit.
The idea is a total waste of money -- there is no way that the brain drain will stop until for-profit Healthcare corporations quit hiring so many H1B doctors for wages that are much lower than doctors here yet are still higher than those in the third world; that goes for just about every other erudite profession, as well.
IANAD, but I'm married to one. And having seen her go through Harvard Med, all I can say is that what she learned that was bookish or memorized was only a small part of her education. And I don't mean things as obvious as surgery, which you really don't learn as a med student anyway. Here is a short list of things you don't learn studying a screen: clinical judgement, the physical exam (how does a healthy liver feel?), reading films and slides, not to mention patient interaction in order to get as close-to-accurate info as possible. Pretty quick in med school, you start working wiht patients, and just getting comfortable and good at the interview, exam, and writing a good note about it is not easy.
If you can put it online to learn it, you can also go online to look it up. I want a doctor who has the skills, perceptions, and judgement you get by doing.
...begins in wonder
This isn't true. I just spent the last 5 years watching my wife and all her friends go from taking the MCATs to becoming interns. First year is alot of studying, but you do the whole cadavar thing. But in first year, and even more so in second year, you learn the physical exam and patient interviewing. They do rotations all 3rd and 4th year, including doing a sub-internship as a 4th year where yes, you are even playing the role of an intern. And BTW - there are med students on ER, though no longer including Lucy since she departed the show the hard way.
...begins in wonder
Really cool scheme very much like the paperless college ideas that have been floating around
I don't think that the idea is to let more people study medecine , more along the lines of everyone who is studing it and will be studying it, will be using the same resources
ie. I'm studing in Athens and decide to move to London to study then I'll be using the same material as long as I go to a university that is part of the group and I would have to worry about having used diff. text books and such
Standardisation
Oh well that's just my take
I disagree. I have a friend who is starting out at med school, and the very first week they had her and her classmates assigned to a doctor to accompany him/her on their rounds and to get them started up taking blood pressure, reading charts, real basic stuff. What they were *really* supposed to be learning was how to act around patients with tact and confidence. Lets face it; if the Dr. acts like a schmuck when you come in for whatever, you're not going to trust them. Also, like you mentioned there is nothing quite like working on a cadaver--when I was an undergrad I had to dissect quite a few organisms to understand physiology and the computer simulations while good are not as good as the real thing. Plus if you're working on a cadaver, it hammers home that you're going to be working on *people* like no computer simulation ever could. As for the wrote memorization biochemistry for med students or whatnot, I don't know about you but my lecture/memorization courses were *always* accompanied by labs to help you understand the material in context. These online degrees are generally inferior and I sure as hell don't want my doctor to have been "educated" in one.
When you know the answer is "NO"!
The inevitable answer is that this will open up the medical degree experience for many- some will do nothing with it and some will flourish and become star doctors.
Bringing up an idea without any research or (even better) empirical results on slashdot is giving the professional naysayers far too much grist for the mill.
I'm sure if you said "What if we started a global network! And have it initially funded by the government..." on the 1950's version of slashdot all those schmucks would have said "What, and call it the internet? hah! It'll never work!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Excuse me while I chime in here. I'm not a real
doctor but I play one on IM. Clients often ask me: "Doctor, why is it that I feel bad." And I chuckle and I say, "Listen to me SuckMe93, I've had lots of patients like you: People that just don't feel good. I've seen them come and I've seen them go. But in the end it all works out. It's like the skaters say: 'It's all good.'"
Now my point is, we're all doctors aren't we? I mean we take a little, we give a little. We wake up, we feel good. We sleep, and then we swim in the sea of life and we heal.
Thanks for listening,
- The Doctor.
And how are you going to know ? Do you ask every doctor you've ever seen where they got their doctorate ? I don't know many people that do, or even question their doctor's ability. I've been to a few that I wouldn't go back to, but not because I doubted their ability, rather that I didn't feel they were 'right' for me. if someone is good at bullshitting they'll get their doctorate one way or another. Just because someone went to an online school doesn't make them worse than someone who managed to make their way through med school with their only motivation being financial gain.