Isn rote memorization crucial for a medical student to learn the huge volume of knowledge necessary to practice as a physician?
A. Please refer to our page on how memory works. It is difficult to memorize material from books or lecture notes, and even more difficult to retain that information for a long period of time. When the student is seeing live patients, face-to-face, he will read about illnesses and their treatments and associate this knowledge with actual patients. Not only is this a more natural and pleasant learning process, this association process is far more conducive to long term memory.
