Seems awfully expensive.

I really don’t know, so put away the flamethrowers. The clinical skills exam was before my time.

My concern is not that clinical skills are not useful, of course you need clinical skills. But does the exam really measure this?

Or are our new doctors spending a lot of money for a useless exercise?

I can’t think of one thing I was taught in basic sciences that didn’t help my practice of medicine. True, I dont remember 90% of it, but so what?

Seriously Bob, what should be trimmed, specifically! And since testing promotes memorization, and rote memorization is the only way to remember 1000 anatomic names and drug side effects, what slternative is there?

Similarly, medical school is the same thing at a higher level, teaching you how to teach yourself, how to reformulate ideas as new concepts develop in medicine. How to recognize that something isn’t what it looked like at first. It’s basic science that helps us do this. Like any part of a medical education there has to be some rigor in the method, some measure of learning. Otherwise, you may as well just be part of an audience watching basic science documentaries in a passive way.

Personally, I’d like to see more emphasis placed on biochemisty, physiology and pharmacology and less emphasis on molecular biology in the medical school curriculum.

And more to the point, is it important or not? If not worth knowing, why bother teaching it in the first place?

If it’s not worth testing, aren’t you saying it’s not worth knowing? Why bother having standards? Pass the test, fail the test, you’re a doctor anyway.

Where the basic sciences becomes most useful can be interpreting tests. I’ve run into many occasions where a test shows a certain result, nurses say this result = certain action to follow. Without getting into details in a forum like this, it is clear the people involved don’t know the purpose of the test, what precisely it’s measuring, the limitations of the test, etc.

I’m thinking of one instance in particular where a child was about to be led onto a wild goose chase of invasive testing, ICU stays, etc., because of a false-positive test. I had to spend a lot of time explaining pharmacology and biochemistry to various nursing administrative types who stuck their noses into the particular matter. Yes, I was right in the end……

I know it, because I learned the basic science. That’s what’s supposed to be one of the things distinguishing us from the NP’s, etc.

Whether it’s minutia or otherwise, without testing, how do you know if the student learned anything at all in basic science?