Category: Education

Continuing medical education: Why it’s important and how to make it effective

With the escalating pressures on hospitals, health care facilities, and practitioners to be cost-effective, it is increasingly difficult to justify spending money on education and training. Education and training are expensive when adding together the …

What makes health care workers superhuman

“So, the next step in the history taking process is to define the pain. You start this by asking for site, with questions like, “Where are you experiencing the pain? Can you pinpoint the site or is it more general? Does the pain radiate (spread anywher…

How 5-year-olds brought out the joy of learning in medical students

Last week, Lais and Yuri, our five-year-old twins, were volunteers at the school of medicine, for students to learn how to examine children. Full disclosure: Volunteers do get a gift card. Therefore, I asked them if they wanted to “work and get s…

What it’s like to take a MPH gap year

It has been nearly seven months since I made the decision to take a year off from medical school to pursue a master’s of public health (MPH) degree in Baltimore and nearly eleven months since I last saw a patient. From attending a Public Citizen …

Here’s why you should get a chaplain for your patient

It was my first week of internal medicine rotation. A newly-minted third-year, I was rotating on the wards back in the spring, when I met a 90-something-year-old gentleman. He had come in for confusion after a fall. There were no relatives or friends i…

Start with the students: Addressing the future of physician suicide

The first day I sought counseling, I felt like I was committing a crime. Our afternoon anatomy lecture had just ended, and the entirety of our first-year medical class—clad in hunter green scrubs and reciting the intrinsic muscles of the back—paraded i…

The new USMLE Step 1: How your medical school and residency will change

With the advent of countless resources and study aids over the years to help medical students prepare for the USMLE Step 1 exam, ranging from the venerable First Aid review book and Anki flashcard decks, to online tools such as UWorld, Pathoma, Sketchy…

In honor of Black History Month: Thank you to all the doctors breaking boundaries

In honor of Black History Month, I wrote this article to say thank you to all the wonderful black doctors breaking boundaries and exploring careers that would have been unattainable to black people in late 1800 and even early 1900 America. To all the b…

USMLE Step 1 pass/fail winners and losers

On February 12, 2020, the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) announced that the USMLE Step 1 will transition to a pass/fail exam in January 2022 at the earliest. This move comes amidst increasing pressure on the NBME regarding its financial con…

As I become a better baker, I hope that I will continue to become a better doctor

Growing up in a Korean household meant that I had very little experience with the type of baking that most Americans are used to; My grandma made rice cakes, not birthday cakes. But during my third year of medical school, an intern recommended a show c…