By Leah Pierson
Medical students spend a lot of time learning about conditions they will likely never treat. This weak relationship between what students are taught and what they will treat has negative implications for patient care.
Tag: medical school
Ethics Education in U.S. Medical Schools’ Curricula
By Leah Pierson
I recently argued that we need to evaluate medical school ethics curricula. Here, I explore how ethics courses became a key component of medical education and what we do know about them. Read More
We Need to Evaluate Ethics Curricula
By Leah Pierson
Health professions students are often required to complete training in ethics. But these curricula vary immensely in terms of their stated objectives, time devoted to them, when during training students complete them, who teaches them, content covered, how students are assessed, and instruction model used. Evaluating these curricula on a common set of standards could help make them more effective.
Medical Schools Need to Do More to Reduce Students’ Debt
By Leah Pierson
Today, the average medical student graduates with more than $215,000 of debt from medical school alone.
The root cause of this problem — rising medical school tuitions — can and must be addressed.
In real dollars, a medical degree costs 750 percent more today than it did seventy years ago, and more than twice as much as it did in 1992. These rising costs are closely linked to rising debt, which has more than quadrupled since 1978 after accounting for inflation.
Debt burdens
Physicians with more debt are more likely to experience to burnout, substance use disorders, and worse mental health. And, as the cost of medical education has risen, the share of medical students hailing from low-income backgrounds has fallen precipitously, compounding inequities in medical education.