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Medical Students Learn to Retain Their Compassion - 1, 2
At UT Health Science Center at Houston 's new John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit, faculty members agree that medical schools need to foster their students' innate humanity. Medicine's emphasis on technology and its long hours can make students forget why they came to medical school in the first place, said Judianne Kellaway.
“The human aspects of medicine get pushed aside because of other priorities,” said Dr. Kellaway, an associate professor and ophthalmologist at the health science center at Houston . “You forget you came into medicine to make a human connection with an individual person.”
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First-year medical students at UTHSC San Antonio present their research about ethical problems they may one day face as physicians. |
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Back in San Antonio , Jerald Winakur guided a class of first-year students as they made small-group presentations about ethical dilemmas they might face as physicians. This was the last class in their first-year humanities curriculum.
Would it be ethical, for example, to offer highly experimental and potentially dangerous face transplants – even to severely injured patients who are mentally fit? No successful animal transplants have been performed, the students said, except in rats. Lacking facial expressions, the rodents aren't the appropriate comparisons primates would be.
“But, at some point, someone has to be the first to try something,” said student Denise De Los Santos. “That's what happened with kidney transplants.”
True, Dr. Winakur agreed. “They kept trying kidney transplants again and again, without any success,” he said. “At that time, people were saying what we're saying now – that researchers were pushing the envelope. And now look: kidney transplants have become routine.”
Still, Dr. Winakur said, what about social justice? What about the costs and resources that would go into this kind of elective surgery?
A second group of students considered the case of conjoined twins. Should they be surgically separated if it means a normal life for one, but death for the other, weaker twin?
Each student group presented medical, philosophical and legal background. They talked about relevant comparisons, social costs, patient autonomy. They explored their future roles as physicians who would ideally help their patients make the best decisions possible for themselves.
What about extra embryos created during fertilization treatments? Should they be destroyed? Donated to another couple or to medical research?
Should all babies receive mandatory post-natal testing for HIV?
At the end of the class, first-year students Kelly Yee and Lara Pierce said they wished the course had lasted longer.
“It's been great just to sit and discuss these questions,” Ms. Pierce said. “Looking at all these hard questions will make our judgment calls completely different when we start practicing medicine. Dr. Winakur made sure we focus on and keep our best principles. He doesn't want us to lose our patient advocacy.”
“This class,” Ms. Yee said, “has brought it all alive.”
-- Ruth Pennebaker
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