What are the challenges facing medical education, around the country and at Yale?
The problem with medical school in general is that there is a language of between 15,000 and 20,000 new words that must be learned by students before they can converse with their colleagues about patients. Because of the time pressure to learn that language during the first two years of medical studies, it s hard to weave a meaningful clinical experience early on. But clinical studies can be put into those first two years. And after that there is no reason we can t have a more fluid integration between clinical and basic science during the third and fourth years. One of the challenges of medical education is teaching the content at the right time. We have a pretty good view of what we need to teach. The problem is finding the right spot. We often teach genetics concepts in the first year, which is appropriate. Then we teach abnormal genetic makeup in the second year, and that is more suitable to the third and fourth year. A good deal of the basic science would be much more interesting
