Unknown Author

By Unknown Author - Apr 24, 2011

I watch the second-year students file into the Ether Dome for their first day of my Patient–Doctor 2 course. For me, this course marks their true entry into medical school. Here, they will refine their history-taking skills, building on their knowledge of pathophysiology and disease; they will learn how to perform a physical examination; and they will touch a living stranger’s body as clinicians for the first time. For them, right now, these are just skills to be learned. They do not see how they will be transformed by them. They know that these newfound abilities will open the door to clinical medicine. They do not know how utterly changed they will be by crossing that threshold. Last year, they took Patient–Doctor 1, which teaches the essential framework of history-taking and interviewing skills, with an emphasis on understanding the patient’s experience. The scuttlebutt is that PD 1 is the ‘soft’ stuff, with its focus on how it feels to be a patient, ill and vulnerable, and its emphasis on self-reflection. They believe that PD 2 is the ‘real’ stuff, the opportunity to start examining patients and taking histories about real disease. They do not understand the importance of what they learned last year, because they do not know how powerful they will become, how patients will hang on their words, how devastating a careless word can be. They do not know how they can ‘do everything right’ and still be ineffective because their behavior has alienated a patient who therefore never returns or does not take necessary medication. How do I convey all this to them while they are still on the other side — where they understand the patient’s perspective more than the doctor’s? Now they are appalled if they see a physician behave rudely or insensitively to a patient. Later, they may behave so themselves. Numerous authors have noted the discrepancy between the values we purport to teach in the ‘explicit curriculum’ and what the students observe and mimic in the ‘implicit curric

By Unknown Author - Apr 24, 2010

Mother, how can the functioning of the body "attain to a supreme capacity"?

By Unknown Author - Apr 24, 2009

The gift of healing rests within everyone. It is not a gift given only to a few. It is your birthright as much as it is mine. Everyone can receive healing and everyone can learn to heal. Everyone can give healing to themselves and to others.

By Unknown Author - Apr 24, 2007

Has science arrived at its limits? This is the subject of a debate doing the rounds in prominent scientific circles. The last limits of the atom have been probed, the last codes of the cryptic script of life are on the way to being cracked. The human brain is being intensively scanned and mapped to discover its complex networking. No doubt, there is much work still left to do but that is more in the field of application of the fundamental truths already discovered.

By Unknown Author - Oct 15, 2024

Life and Death, Creation and Destruction have moved together, hand in hand since the time the universe or universes came into existence. The reason for this is obvious. Creation is an ongoing process just as life is a continuous process. With each breath, we push in the creative energy of life. But this endless creative impulsion has to be balanced by destruction to make way for the new.