Ultimate Guide to Medical Schools (U.S. NEWS ULTIMATE GUIDE TO MEDICAL SCHOOLS) - Softcover

Fischman, Josh; U. S. News & World Roport Staff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1402207050 ISBN 13: 9781402207051

Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc, 2006

Synopsis

A lot of people decide they want to become doctors in high school-or sometimes at age 5. But medical school will take at least 7 years of your life, you'll have to compete with 40,000 other people to get in, and it could land you more than $100,000 in debt by the time you're done.

For those brave enough to take the challenge, the U.S. News Ultimate Guide to Medical Schools combines expert advice on how to get into medical school, U.S. News' exclusive lists that help you compare schools and data on the nation's medical-school programs.

Featuring expert advice on how to choose the right school, how to get in and then how to pay for it all, this step-by-step guide is a life-saver for the life savers. It explains:

- Why not all schools are equal and how to pick the best match for you
- The art of getting in, including succeeding at the MCAT, writing the personal essay and what admissions officers really look for and what they hate
- Exclusive profiles of five top medical school programs
- A complete directory featuring contact info, information on cost and financial aid, MCAT scores of students and more

About this title

About the Author:

Josh Fischman, the book's lead writer and one of its editors, covers health and science for U.S. News & World Report. His weekly health column, "Pulse," appears on www.usnews.com. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at Earth, deputy news editor at Science, and a senior editor at Discover. Josh has won the Blakeslee Award for excellence in medical reporting from the American Heart Association.

Founded in 1933, Washington, D.C.-based U.S. News & World Report delivers a unique brand of weekly magazine journalism to its 12.2 million readers. In 1983, U.S. News began its exclusive annual rankings of American colleges and universities. The U.S. News education franchise is second to none, with its annual college and graduate school rankings among the most eagerly anticipated magazine issues in the country. Available online at www.usnews.com, U.S News was recently named the most credible newsweekly by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Excerpt from Chapter 1
A Med Student's First Year
Let's say you make it through your premed coursework, do well on the MCATs, and actually get into medical school. What happens next? Rachel Sobel was a young medical writer when she decided that the world she'd been covering as a journalist was something she wanted to experience firsthand. She'd majored in the history of science at Harvard and finished her premed coursework shortly after college. In 2002 she enrolled at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine (UCSF). "The process of becoming a physician is exhilarating," she said. "You will learn more about yourself and the world around you than you ever have." When she started school, Sobel also chronicled her experiences as a new med student. Here's her report from the front lines.

Meet Mr. Danovic
Sirens were blaring when the paramedics wheeled in John Danovic. The twenty-nine-year-old motorcyclist, who had just been laid off from his trucking job, had been drinking. He got hit by a car and thrown from his bike. Blood oozed from wounds in his scalp and chest, and a broken bone was jutting out of one arm.

The scene could have come straight out of any ER, but the case of John Danovic unfolded before my eyes in a lecture hall, not a hospital. The "blood"was actually a viscous burgundy concoction, and the team of doctors and nurses attending to the actor playing Mr. Danovic were my professors. Welcome to my first lecture at medical school.
Med school isn't famous for its drama, nor is it known for its openness to change. Yet as the Mr. Danovic lecture reveals, change is afoot. Indeed, there is something of a revolution underway, transforming the first years of medical education. Many schools are dramatically revamping their curricula to prepare future physicians for an increasingly fragmented health care system in which any body of biomedical knowledge is bound to be quickly outdated.

Medical education has been virtually unchanged since the early twentieth century, when educators first standardized training. The "2+2" curriculum devoted the first two years to basic science lectures and the last two years to hospital training. Most med schools still use that general framework, but at UCSF and several other places, the first two years would be unrecognizable to a physician who graduated even five years ago. Forget lectures from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Professors here have trimmed away esoteric hard science, keeping only what's essential to patient care. The reasoning is that you don't have to be a biochemist to be a skillful internist. In place of all that lab time, new disciplines are now considered essential to medical training, such as psychology, ethics, and even anthropology. For example, a patient assaulted by a gang (a real victim, unlike Mr. Danovic) talked to us about the psychological dimensions of healing.

David Irby, vice dean of education at UCSF, told me that the school's overhaul was driven in part by studies saying that newly minted M.D.s were unprepared to navigate today's health care system.
There was also a widespread sense that medical school, rather than being an inspiring experience, had become a deadening one. Why did education have to be a boring exercise in memorization?

Mr. Danovic's case teaches that it can be otherwise. From him we learned the proper way to insert a chest tube (over the rib so you don't hit the nerves or vessels) and to recognize the signs of shock. Making the material more clinically relevant is not only more compelling but also more practical: According to Irby, study after study suggests that human memory is better wired for narrative than for rote learning.

Another major change taking place in medical training is an increased emphasis on cooperation, which grew out of the frequent observation that new doctors had great difficulty working in teams. You can imagine twenty- and thirty-somethings scoffing at the nursery school notion of cooperative learning, but in fact it's instilled so subtly that it's the way we're learning to think about how medicine works. Grades are pass/fail, which discourages competition. Half our classes take place in small groups, where the only way to learn is from one another. Picture a class where everyone doffs their shirts (women wear sports bras) and students draw on each other with Mr. Sketch markers to learn the complex intertwining of nerves, arteries, and veins of the arm. Being halfnaked with classmates in "surface anatomy" isn't exactly a breeding ground for cutthroat rivalry.

Speaking of anatomy, I know my Uncle Peter will ask me over winter break how it went. Before I left for California, he regaled me with tales from his own medical school days-and reminded me to get there early for anatomy to get the best cadaver. I'm bracing for the next "In my day..." speech. But at UCSF, we learn from already dissected cadavers, and there is no competition to get the best one. Instead of spending hours trying to dig out, say, the renal artery, the idea is to save time and learn first from an intact specimen. To be sure, students still do a lot of memorizing. (For the eight wrist bones, remember: Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform....You get the idea.) And budding surgeons can take a dissection elective, on, say, the abdomen or the pelvis. No one knows if this new approach will prove better than the old one. Other schools that have made similar switches admit to growing pains.

The ultimate measure is whether this generation of M.D.s will be better doctors in the modern health care system. On that, we'll have to wait to hear from the real Mr. Danovic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1402207050
• ISBN 13: 9781402207051
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: McGrath Anne