A Medscape editorial against the age-old practice:
Unfortunately, medical students who are mistreated often go on to become doctors who mistreat other medical students, creating a cycle of abuse. This pattern has continued despite “righteous declarations by the academic community.” To break this cycle now, individual physicians will have to acknowledge these unhealthy behaviors. They must get beyond any mistreatment they suffered and demonstrate the compassionate behavior that colleagues, students, and patients deserve.
(via Clinical Cases)
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{ 4 comments }
Somehow the practice of ‘pimping’ medical students, the medical version of socratic exchange and education, had gotten labeled as hazing.
I found that the best defence against being shamed in front of your peers was to know your shit. Med students are adult learners who must take responsibility for figuring out for themselves what they need to know and discovering how to know it. Pimping is merely the art of feedback to demonstrate where they went astray. Those who are used to being spoon fed or had IEPs coddle them from the harsh realities of life are the only ones who complain about pimping.
A poorly competent minority might be raising heckels about pimping, but I suspect a silent majority took satisfaction at their successes and learning that happend during their pimping experiences.
Do we really want doctors who feel that they cannot verbally answer questions relating to factual knowlege or judgement in medicine?
There’s “fair” and “unfair” pimping.
I knew a faculty member at a University medical center who would ask really obscure questions about all sorts of subjects. Pharmacology of drugs where the mechanism is poorly understood. The question I got, I subsequently asked several faculty in that field, none of them knew.
The idea then, was he would pull aside a medical student, happened to be walking by, and casually ask the same question. Of course, the student would have the answer right at hand.
“That’s the kind of in-depth knowledge we expect of our people here”
As opposed to the dump you came from……..
I went on to become faculty at the same place. That same (one) faculty member was still doing it. I came to realize the students he was pulling aside, they were doing research in that particular issue. The student may not know what side the liver is on, or the dose of HCTZ for hypertension, or what hole the endotracheal tube goes in, but that obscure piece of biochemical knowledge, and a different obscure piece for each student, was on the tip of their tongue.
Where I came from, the “rule” was supposed to be, you didn’t pimp on something you just read the night before. And no “badgering the witness”.
But yes, socratic teaching does have a place in medical school.
I believe Panda Bear has a term for this – among attendings who can’t just get over their training trauma – mental masturbation?
http://www.villagehatshop.com/learn-to-pimp.html
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