To lighten the mood, when patients ask me where I went to medical school, I sometimes joke that I got my medical degree online. This usually invites laughter because it is preposterous that medicine could be taught virtually. After all, medicine is a noble professional with time-honored traditions of passing down experiential information and hands-on training provided to students who need years of face time with patients before being able to practice independently. So as I currently work to help build a new allopathic medical school and in the process become more familiar with modern medical education, it seems that medical education has significantly changed and is not how I recognized it a decade ago. In fact, the possibility of a nearly online undergraduate medical school seems alarmingly possible.
When imagining medical school, one might think of rites of passage, such as enduring lengthy professor-driven lectures in cavernous lecture halls, spending hours dissecting cadavers, peering into microscopes looking at histology sections or reviewing lecture notes and reading review books in the wee hours of the night in the dark confines of a library.
Today, these elements of medical education have become nearly obsolete, and the mere mention of the word “lecture” is somewhat faux pas. Cadaveric dissection is being done either with virtual reality or well-preserved, previously dissected specimens, microscopes can be replaced with virtual ones that mimic the manipulation of an actual microscope and have the added ability to augment images with teaching points, and lectures are being replaced with group learning and self-teaching tools. Students are no longer being bottlenecked into a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it approach to learning.
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