Perverting medical history in the service of "animal rights"

Scientists frequently disagree on the interpretation of data. Such disagreements follow an informal set of rules, where one assumes that the contestants are honestly engaged even though biases may cloud their minds. A new group of individuals with medical training operates under a different set of rules, however: any statement or argument may be used to support the animal rightists' contention that using animals to advance human medicine is wrong. These "medical scientists" pervert the scientific discourse in which most of us engage. Their fabrications are egregious. They take legitimate scientists' statements out of context, construct statements out of larger passages to twist arguments in their favor, and cite works that actually are contrary to their arguments for effect. This essay reveals the distortions by a number of such medically trained individuals that I and several colleagues have uncovered.     

"The City Is My Mother": Narratives of Schizophrenia and Homelessness

Recent narrative analysis in medical anthropology provides keys to both the personal meaning of illness and the historical, cultural, and institutional shaping of that experience. Yet Western psychiatric thinking and practice continue to view schizophrenic discourse as closed to interpretation. Caught in this "closed text," the self would seem obliterated. But using narratives of schizophrenia and homelessness, this essay proposes a different understanding of schizophrenic alterity. The openness of the text-as-experience is re-created collectively, from outside the subject's narration: the subject's "self is construction through the added perspectives of his or her interlocutors in the role of storymakers.     

研究型医院研究生培养的几点想法

研究型医院是指以完成临床医疗工作为基本任务,以培养优秀人才为突出优势,以创新性科学研究为重要使命,以制定和修定临床医学标准和规范为水平标志的大型综合型医院。其是我国医院管理界的新生事物。要走研究型医院快速、持续发展之路,提高医院的整体诊治水平,就必须大力培育复合型人才。研究生培养作为研究型医院优秀人才培养的重要组成部分,在培养过程中必然需要新的培养方式。建立与研究型医院发展相适应的研究生培养机制,诱导研究生国际视野,培养研究生创新意识,激发研究生求知欲望,训练研究生专项特长,树立研究生转化医学思维,才能培养出适应研究型医院发展需要的研究生。本文就研究型医院研究生培养的几点想法与同行共享。     

Promoting collaborations between biomedical scholars in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa

The premise of this piece is that a priority of international health should be to increase the number of investigators in the US and other developed countries who engage in research and other kinds of scholarly work in underdeveloped parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa where the overall disease burden is the highest and the gap in biomedical research infrastructure is the widest. The author's aim is to encourage medical students, resident doctors, and medical school faculty to devote a part of their career to teach, acquire clinical skills, or participate in research with health professionals at teaching hospitals in Africa. After briefly describing the thinking that led the author to Nigeria 30 years ago to teach and study biochemical aspects of health problems in rural and urban areas, he discusses some of the factors one needs to consider before entering into an international partnership, including identifying the right foreign collaborators, selecting a suitable research site, setting realistic goals, learning the local culture and indigenous language, and defining a theme for your program. Lastly, the piece points out potential pitfalls and problems that are often overlooked or underestimated in the early phases of planning an international partnership, including lukewarm institutional support at home, inflexible institutional review boards, dominance of the program by the US partner, maintaining continuity, and striking the right balance between scholarly work and humanitarian efforts. My hope is that US students and faculty in the health professions who read this piece will be stimulated and encouraged to consider how they might integrate into their curriculum or academic life visits lasting several months or more each year during which they would teach or train others or engage in research at a teaching hospital in some country in Africa.     

Reviewing RAWP. Is the medical service increment for teaching (SIFT) adequate?

One issue of interest to the current review of the Resource Allocation Working Party (RAWP) formula is the extra service costs associated with medical teaching. RAWP intended the medical service increment for teaching (SIFT) to cover these costs. Although it is not possible to assess from the methods used to derive the SIFT rate whether it is or is not overgenerous for its intended purpose, the "excellence" elements of teaching hospitals tend to be protected. The financial problems of the teaching hospitals are more likely to be due to the relatively high use of services by local residents. But cutting services of London teaching hospitals to bring this use down to equitable levels may impair their capacity to train medical students.     

提高临床实习教学质量的实践与体会

临床实习是医学生大学教育阶段的重要组成部分,是医学生向临床医生转型的过渡时期。临床实习质量的高低直接关系到医学生的培养质量。在实习期间培养出扎实的临床基本功、科学的临床思维和高尚的医德医风对于医学生而言是非常重要的。同时,临床实习教学也是医学院校及教学医院的工作重心。作为教学医院,我院多年来积极推进教学改革,不断探索提升临床实习质量的方法,部分科室率先开展了PBL等新的教学模式,并取得了卓越的成效。我院领导阶层也通过抓好教学准备、提升带教质量、严格实习考核等方面的工作,全面提升了临床实习教学质量,从而提高了医学生的综合素质,也为提高执业医师考试通过率打下了坚实的基础。     

Institutional non‐participation in assisted dying: Changing the conversation

Whether institutions and not just individual doctors have a right to not participate in medical assistance in dying (MAID) is controversial, but there is a tendency to frame the issue of institutional non‐participation in a particular way. Conscience is central to this framing. Non‐participating health centres are assumed to be religious and full participation is expected unless a centre objects on conscience grounds. In this paper we seek to reframe the issue. Institutional non‐participation is plausibly not primarily, let alone exclusively, about conscience. We seek to reframe the issue by making two main points. First, institutional non‐participation is primarily a matter of institutional self‐governance. We suggest that institutions have a natural right of self‐governance which, in the case of health centres such as hospitals or hospices, includes the right to choose whether or not to offer MAID. Second, there are various legitimate reasons unrelated to conscience for which a health centre might not offer MAID. These range from considerations such as institutional capacity and expertise to a potential contradiction with palliative care and a concern to not conflate palliative care and MAID in public consciousness. It is a mistake to frame the conversation simply in terms of conscience‐based opposition to MAID or full participation. Our goal is to open up new space in the conversation, for reasons unrelated to conscience as well as for non‐religious health centres who might nonetheless have legitimate grounds for not participating in MAID.     

Bodies and borders: a new cultural history of medicine

Both medicine and the history of medicine have seen many changes in the last four decades. The way we tell the story of medical developments no longer concentrates on the important doctors and their ideas. The influences of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s have broadened and enriched the interpretations of our medical past. The social historians have helped us to include politics, economics, and the leading ideas of any period we wanted to study; the cultural approach has added ethnography as well as an emphasis on language or discourse.Today there is a new history of medicine, one far more willing to cross disciplinary boundaries to ask questions about how we know what we know and why we do what we do.This article highlights some of the work in the adjoining fields of medical anthropology and of literature and medicine to demonstrate new interests, new questions, and new methods of inquiry. However, although we have cast our nets far more widely in the process of professionalizing the history of medicine, there is a question about whether we have lost the appeal to one of our core constituencies: medical students and physicians. We need to welcome some of the new changes in medical history as in medicine itself; the common goal is to achieve a better understanding of what we have done and what we are doing.     

医学微生物学课程思政的探索与实践

医学微生物学是医学专业的一门重要基础课程,学生覆盖面广,实用性强。医学微生物学课程中开展思想政治教育是立德树人的根本举措,同时也能提升教学效果。要开展课程思政教学,不仅应该提高教师自身的思政教育能力,同时还要注重思政教学团队的建设。本文详细列举了医学微生物学课程中开展思政教学的一些案例,借此对医学生进行正确的价值引领,从而培养他们强烈的社会责任感、社会公德及良好的职业道德,增强他们的民族自信和文化自信,提升爱国主义情怀。     

公益化视角下公立医院社会责任体系构建

公立医院是我国医疗服务的主体,同时也是社会责任的必然承担者。公益化视角下公立医院在获取自身生存和发展的同时,应最大程度地承担起“救死扶伤、生命至上”的社会责任新内涵。公立医院社会责任缺失与医疗市场越位、政府补偿缺位及医务人员宗旨意识错位有关。公益化视角下公立医院社会责任体系重建要改革公立医院运行机制、统筹利用社会各方力量、积极营造社会责任的文化氛围、提高医院综合管理水平及建立基于公益性的绩效考核方案。因此,要发挥公立医院社会责任要正确认识公立医院社会责任本质,应正确处理好社会责任与经营性之间的关系及充分发挥公立医院社会责任的利益相关方力量。有关企业社会责任及治理结构的理论和方法对研究医院相关问题有重要借鉴作用,但不能照搬,中国经济、管理和卫生领域专家在公立医院社会责任及实现机制方面的探索还有许多工作要做。     

Contesting "Culture": The Perspectives of Hmong American Female Students on Early Marriage

This article complicates the meanings of early marriage among Hmong American female students. It moves beyond explanations of cultural difference in the examination and explication of the discourse and practice of early marriage among female adolescents in the Hmong community. Drawing on the perspectives and experiences of Hmong American female students, this article reveals that early marriage may be an expression of students' opposition to the structures of and experiences with school and family. The significance of this analysis is its recognition and illumination of the fluidity of cultural and social practices, and the tensions between and within ethnic groups.     

The use of multiple tools for teaching medical biochemistry

In this work, we describe the use of several strategies employing the philosophies of active learning and problem-based learning (PBL) that may be used to improve the teaching of metabolic biochemistry to medical and nutritional undergraduate students. The main activities are as follows: 1) a seminar/poster system in a mini-congress format (using topics of applied biochemistry); 2) a true/false applied biochemistry exam (written by peer tutors); 3) a 9-h exam on metabolism (based in real publications); 4) the Advanced Biochemistry course (directed to peer tutors, where students learn how to read and criticize real medical papers); 5) experiments about nutrition and metabolism, using students as volunteers, and about free radicals (real science for students); 6) the BioBio blog (taking advantage of the "web age," this enhances out of class exchanges of information between the professor, students, and peer tutors); 7) student lectures on public health issues and metabolic disorders directed to the community and lay people; and 8) the BioBio quiz show. The main objective of these activities is to provide students with a more practical and interesting approach to biochemistry, such as the application of theoretical knowledge to real situations (diseases, experiments, media information, and scientific discoveries). In addition, we emphasize the importance of peer tutor activities for optimized learning of both students and peer tutors, the importance of a closer interaction between students and teaching staff, and the necessity to initiate students precociously in two broad fields of medical activity: "real" basic science and contact with the public (also helping students--future doctors and nutritionists--to be able to communicate with lay people). Most activities were evaluated by the students through written questionnaires and informal conversations, along various semesters, indicating good acceptance and approval of these methods. Good student scores in the biochemistry exams and seminars indicated that these activities are also working as valid educational tools.     

PACS辅助教学在医学影像学实习教学中的应用探讨

尝试应用影像存储及传输系统(Picture Archiving and Communication System,PACS),对我院临床本科生进行影像学实习教学。首先应用PACS建立电子影像学图片库,学生在PACS联网的计算机上学习教学内容,通过定期随堂测验、期末考试和课后问卷调查评估PACS辅助教学的教学效果,对PACS辅助教学在医学影像学实习教学中的应用价值进行探讨。与以往传统医学影像学实习教学方法相比,PACS辅助教学在医学影像学实习教学中具有激发学生学习主动性、提高学习效率和学生读片能力的优越性,显著提高教学效果和教学质量,对促进医学影像学教学改革具有重要意义。     

The "Other" Story of Model Minorities: Korean American High School Dropouts in an Urban Context

This article analyzes how socioeconomic backgrounds, social capital, and school resources affect Korean American youths' educational attainment and aspirations. In the context of limited social and economic support, students delineate differences within coethnic communities along class lines and adopt an oppositional cultural frame of reference to endure and resist institutional barriers. This study demonstrates the significance of distinguishing socioeconomic differences within Korean American communities and for whom the enclaves may be more beneficial.     

地市级大型公立医院临床研究型发展模式可行性研究

地市级大型公立医院选择临床研究型发展模式是国家政策的引导、区域医疗的需求以及医疗市场竞争和医疗机构自身发展的需要。确立“临床研究型医院”战略、建设“临床研究型医院”管理体系、学科人才、创新平台和文化氛围是“临床研究型医院”的主要发展路径。同时,建设“临床研究型医院”必须妥善处理好临床医疗与科研教学、规模扩张与内涵提升、自主创新与引进吸收的关系。     

八年制临床医学专业实验动物学科教学初探

本文总结了在临床医学八年制的实验动物学科教学中的一些体会,提出了有关教学方法、教学内容、教学重点等方面的建议。希望为八年制医学生未来的科研工作搭建一座有效的桥梁,培养他们出色的科研创新能力。     

新时期大型综合医院创新文化建设平台的实践与思考

创新医院文化建设平台是新时期医疗服务的客观需要。以北京大学第一医院近年来创新文化建设平台的具体实践为例,通过分析新型平台在实际应用过程中的效果和意义,探讨新时期大型综合医院创新文化建设平台的必要性与可行性,研究文化建设促进大型综合医院全面、协调、可持续发展的新思路,阐述了创新医院文化建设平台的效果和意义。     

医学生理学国际化教学的实践与思考

留学生教育是我国高等教育的一个不可缺少的组成部分.在留学生医学教育中,作为桥梁课程连接基础与临床医学的生理学是一门非常重要的基础学科.本文结合近年来对留学生生理教学的实践和研究,从国际留学生特点及生理学教学特点出发,通过制定合适的培养目标和课程教学计划,加强教师自身素质培养,提高英语授课质量,运用多种教学方式激发留学生的学习兴趣及能力,加强授课教师与留学生的交流与沟通方面来探索创新生理学国际化的教学.     

Attitudes to Psychiatry in the General Hospital

A survey of consultant attitudes to psychiatry in six general hospitals is presented and compared with reported findings in general practitioners and medical students.Psychological factors were accepted as important in a variety of medical conditions. Different specialties differed little in their attitudes to neurotic patients and to psychiatrists, younger consultants tending to be more critical. Consultants had a lower level of neuroticism than the general population and medical students, and physicians were less extraverted than surgeons; these personality factors were not related to expressed attitudes.The results suggest that other specialties accept the role of psychiatry, and its integration into the general hospital is not likely to meet with antagonism.     

Antimicrobial drug use in three Canadian general hospitals.

Total amounts of antimicrobial drugs used to treat inpatients during 1975 were calculated for three Canadian general hospitals, one of them the principal teaching hospital of a medical school. Use of drugs was compared with that reported for Boston City Hospital during periods when antimicrobial therapy was and was not supervised by infectious disease consultants. Ampicillin, tetracyclines, cephalosporins, erythromycin and aminoglycosides for prophylactic oral administration were used excessively in the three hospitals. The degree of overuse was comparable to that at Boston City Hospital during years when drug use was uncontrolled. Overuse or improper choice of antimicrobial drug decreases the quality of patient care and increases its cost. More rigorous education is needed for both medical students and practising physicians in the rational use of antimicrobial drugs. Informal consultation with an infectious disease unit should be required before certain overly popular or toxic antibiotics are administered to hospitalized patients.