What Doctors Wish They Learned In Medical School
Medical school may cover a lot of aspects of human health, but it doesn’t cover everything. (Photo: Offset)
Medical school requires multiple years of study, followed by in-the-field training — all necessary (and good!) for building up the knowledge base of the people who treat our illnesses and guide our health.
Even still, medical schools don’t cover every single aspect of health. We asked six top docs to think back to their med school days, and share with us what they wish they learned in their schooling.
(Photo: Stocksy/Daniel Kim)
“I can write a whole book about this, but if I had to choose four big ones, they would be: They don’t teach anything about nutrition — there’s zero education on nutrition! That the body has an innate healing capacity and your job as a physician is to try and stimulate that. That an important job of being a doctor is to teach your patients about how to stay healthy. That drugs and surgery are not the only tools we have to help patients get better.”
- Frank Lipman, MD, integrative and functional medicine expert and author of The New Health Rules
(Photo: Getty Images/David Sacks)
“We had very little emphasis on lifestyle as medicine. There’s relatively little emphasis on nutrition, which has become a key focus of my career. Also, you go into medicine because you care very deeply and get so bogged down in this data dump that goes on for years. Then you’re working 100 hours a week in the hospital. Your humanity gets subordinated. You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself, you forget to feel sorry for the patient. As you become a technician, you’ll find something bizarre happen. You’ll forget how to be a person. You’ll realize I have no idea how to just talk to this person. Once you get proficient enough to get the information you need [from the patient], you can subordinate that for your natural way of speaking. Talk to them, listen, and hear what they say. You’re a human being first and a doctor second. You have to go through that sequence, through the stages of maturation. And then you come out the other end.”
- David Katz, MD, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center and author of Disease-Proof: The Remarkable Truth About What Makes Us Well
Related: 6 Favorite Healthy Meals Of Doctors
(Photo: Jamie/Flickr)
“That the forces marketing medical devices and pharmaceuticals don’t always publish the results of studies that don’t support their products. Caveat emptor.”
- Steven Nissen, MD, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic
(Photo: Getty Images/Jon Feingersh)
“That the patient tells you what’s wrong and even tells you, in certain ways, how to fix it. You just have to listen hard enough. Also, one of the things a lot of doctors could be better at is being more open to new treatments and ideas. I’m open to acupuncture, herbal treatments, meditation, and hypnosis. There’s not just one treatment for anything. As healers, we really need to think openly and try to discover what’s going on to help this person. Not just say, ‘OK, this is the category so we’re going to give them this drug.’”
- Michael Breus, PhD, sleep expert and author of The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep
Related: What Doctors Do When They Get Sick
(Photo: Flickr/Jonathan Rolande)
“I wish they taught me about sex. In medical school, we didn’t really have conversations about what sex is and sexual diversity. We talk about potential negative consequences of sex, like diseases and unwanted pregnancy, but we didn’t talk about what sex is and what people do and all of the different ways people have sex and pleasure, which I’m now trying to change at Columbia.”
- Hilda Hutcherson, MD, gynecologist and associate dean of the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and author of What Your Mother Never Told You About S-E-X
(Photo: Getty Images/Reza Estakhrian)
“How to cope with the incredible overregulation of our business by the government. The bureaucracy and the administrative nonsense that so dilutes the time we have and takes away from patient care.”
- Neal Schultz, MD, New York City-based dermatologist and founder of DermTv.com and creator of BeautyRx by Dr. Schultz.
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