Give It to Me Straight Doc: A Medical Student Perspective on Effective Goal-Oriented Clinical Education.

The clinical years of medical school are a time when students navigate a new learning environment. Due to inexperience, discordance may exist between veteran attendings and students who do not have their bearings in this new setting. We propose a solution to strengthen the clinician-student relationship by promoting a culture of goal-oriented clinical education via a two-pronged approach. First, standardized learning objectives should be established for each clinical rotation. Second, and arguably more importantly, students should create individualized goals to complement these objectives and further their personal educational interests. Once a culture of goal-oriented clinical education is implemented, we believe students will navigate their clinical years with increased confidence and competence. In this piece, we discuss our personal attitudes toward why clinicians and students should set goals, how they can set them, and what these goals should include. Once goals are established, feedback must be provided to students to continue the learning process. This comes in the form of comments from supervising preceptors who focus on areas of interest identified by the student, as well as from the results of standardized assessments. We passionately believe that together, the synergism of goal setting, feedback, and assessment creates a perfect mixture conducive to the formation of a positive learning environment.

Call it as it is - Why medical education should reconsider disease eponyms.

Medical disease names should be reflective of the pathophysiologic processes underlying them. Medical education has propagated the use of outdated eponyms when referring to diseases named after individuals who discovered or described the diseases in question. This is confusing and harmful to medical students learning about these diseases and can present a seemingly insurmountable barrier to understanding complex pathologies. The renaming of diseases that are colloquially referred to by individuals' names is proposed. Medical schools are encouraged to adopt this nomenclature so that students will effectively understand pathophysiology and eventually provide optimal patient care. While it is not feasible to be completely systematic in this approach, striving for this change will enable a spotlight to shine on the disease and not the individuals who popularized the condition. Numerous examples are given of diseases that are either appropriately or inappropriately named, with recommendations for renaming given where applicable. An exploration of the benefits and disadvantages of renaming includes both historical and modern contexts for making the change.