All Posts Tagged With: "medicine"

For some students, four years of undergrad is too much

Photo by Cole Garside

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Richard Warnica.

Shawn Alavi, who graduated from McMaster University in 2006, was 21 when he landed his first engineering job. Today, at 26, he’s a certified engineer—a P.Eng. in the jargon—with years of professional experience, money in the bank and a settled career. “Getting out of school earlier meant I was able to clear my debts earlier,” he says. “Now I’m just saving for my future, deciding on my next step.”

In engineering, Alavi found a profession that allowed him to enter the workforce after just four years of school and to achieve his professional certification through paid experience. “I’ve been working for almost five years now,” he says. “I’ve been able to get my life on track a little quicker than most.”

Continue reading The fast track

New program shows less-wealthy kids a path to medicine

Photo by Richmond Lam

Ridge Cross-McComber is about as blasé as your average overachiever when it comes to his laundry list of goals for the next few years and beyond. He’ll finish his year at Montreal’s Dawson College, move to Vanier College for either nursing or pure and applied science, then go to medical school to become a surgeon. After that, he’ll practise medicine in Kahnawake, his hometown. “I want to be a role model for my community,” says the 17-year-old, sitting in a café in the native reserve near Montreal. “It’s something I want to do for my town and my people. I want to show that I can do this.”

As far as medical school goes, history and statistics are stacked against Cross-McComber. Wealthy students tend to be overrepresented in the field, for one. According to a study by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, nearly 45 per cent of medical students come from families making over $100,000 a year. (Only about 26 per cent of Canadian families are in this demographic, according to the AFMC study.) And while medical schools are decidedly less uniformly Caucasian than they used to be, the AFMC study indicates that many visible minorites continue to be under-represented.

Continue reading Get them where they live

Money will create programs for under-represented youth

More students from under-represented groups will be encouraged to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) fields, thanks to $1.25-million from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.

“Our Government recognizes the importance of preparing young people for today’s high-tech economy,” said Conservative MP Peter Braid at the announcement in Waterloo. “By developing our next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians, we can help drive innovation and keep the economy growing in southern Ontario for years to come.”

The money goes to Actua, a science, engineering and technology outreach network that provides summer camps and classroom workshops delivered by university students. The funding will help create new programs for under-represented children, including Aboriginals, at-risk youth and girls.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Commerce released a study that showed women make up only 25 per cent of the STEM workforce, despite holding nearly 50 per cent of all jobs. They concluded that America’s economic growth is held back by the gender gap in STEM fields.

Students would purchase spaces for $75, 000 a year

To make up for cuts to provincial funding, Dalhousie University is planning to sell 10 medical school spaces to students from Saudi Arabia. The Chronicle Herald reported that an internal memo sent to faculty and students by dean Tom Marrie called the agreement “critically important” and that “From my standpoint, we’re underfunded. We know what our costs are and our revenues are not equal to our costs.” A year ago, the province had planned to cut $2.5 million from the medical school’s budget, which the the government later said was a communication problem involving the health and education departments. $1.4 million has since been restored. The arrangement with Saudi Arabia would see each seat sold for $75,000 per year.

$12 million donation largest in campus’ history

A $12 million donation to the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus will be used to expand medical education. The Terrence Donnelly Health Sciences Complex, named after the retired lawyer who made the donation, will feature an academy of medicine that will enroll 53 medical students a year beginning in 2015. Donnelly’s donation is the largest in UTM history, and was preceded by $10 million from local businessman Carlo Fidani last spring. Fidani, whose donation was also for the medical complex, had publicly challenged others to give an equally large gift. “I think our health care system is among the best in the world, but it has to be delivered to the average person, hopefully in their local neighbourhood or community,” Donnelly said in the Toronto Star. “I believe this is an addition to the university that we need – a new training centre for doctors.”

Controversy over UBC experiments on monkeys

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Condo residents say project lacks ‘cultural sensitivity’

Concerns over “cultural sensitivity” has led the University of British Columbia to postpone plans to build a hospice on campus.

“There are a variety of claims against the project and we want to systematically go through them,” campus and community planning director Joe Stott said. Janet Fan, who owns a condo in a building located on the campus says erecting a hospice next door lacks “cultural sensitivity” towards the Chinese community. “Eighty per cent of the residents in this building are Asian, and 100 per cent of them are very upset,” she said.

Fan told CTV news that the objection stems from a taboo about having living people mixing close to the dying. “Our parents would say things like that ghosts are associated with death and we were just very afraid of the whole death thing,” she said. The project came to the attention of the building’s residents this week at an open house. “We went to the open house and we found out it’s just in our backyard,” Fan said.

The hospice, originally scheduled to be approved in February, but now delayed, was to be run by the Order of St. John Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, with access for faculty at UBC. (Editor’s note: the hospice was proposed by the Order of St. John, apologies)

Course on pain management to be revised

The University of Toronto plans to revise a course on pain management in the faculty of medicine in order to limit influence, or the perception of influence, from pharmaceutical companies. The case centres around complaints about a book that is copyrighted by Purdue Pharma that was distributed to students by one of the authors who had visited the university as a guest lecturer. The story raises questions over whether younger doctors are more willing to prescribe narcotics than more senior physicians.

From the Canadian Press:

A complaint about perceived drug industry involvement in a pain management course for medical students has prompted the University of Toronto to revamp its curriculum.

An informal inquiry into the complaint about potential conflict of interest, lodged earlier this year by an unidentified student and two doctors in the faculty of medicine, has set out clear guidelines about how the course should be taught, by whom and with what sources of funding.

The complaint centred around students being provided a book on managing chronic pain that was funded and copyrighted by the maker of the prescription pain killer OxyContin. The book had been brought in by a non-faculty lecturer with financial ties to the drug company.

In a report obtained by The Canadian Press, inquiry head Lorraine Ferris says “time is of the essence” in revising the interfaculty pain curriculum, a 20-hour course jointly taught to medical, dental, pharmacy and nursing students.

Ferris, associate vice-provost in the department of Health Sciences Policy and Strategy, said by email that she found no evidence of wrongdoing or actual conflict of interest. “However, I was troubled by the perception of conflict of interest and therefore my recommendations … addressed this issue.”

. . .

Dr. David Mock, dean of dentistry at Canada’s largest university, said the four faculties involved in the centre are in the process of implementing the recommendations.

“I think this is a good thing,” said Mock. “I’m not looking at this as a hand-slap for the centre. I think what we’ve done is move it into the more modern governance system that we are developing at the university.

“The course will still be run by the people who know the most about the topic and that’s the people from the Centre for the Study of Pain. The course hasn’t been taken away from them.”

Ferris’s report also said the curriculum should not be “directly funded (in whole or in part) by industry donors who have, or may have, or be perceived to have financial interests in the assessment or management of pain.”

From 2002 to 2006, the pain course was funded by donations, included $117,000 in unrestricted educational grants from four drug companies — Merck-Frosst, Purdue Pharma, Pharmacia Canada and Pfizer — although they had no input into course content. Since 2007, the program has been funded solely from faculty budgets.

Mock said Purdue’s copyrighted book on pain management had been brought in by Dr. Roman Jovey, an unpaid guest lecturer and co-author of the book who left copies “for anyone to take.” Jovey, medical director for a chain of clinics called the Centres for Pain Management, is a member of Purdue’s speakers’ bureau, paid by the company to conduct workshops and lectures.

“It wasn’t distributed by the program,” Mock said of the book. “But we stopped that because, again, there’s reality and there’s appearances and it appeared as if we were pushing the books, so to speak. So we stopped doing that, we stopped before the inquiry.

Read the rest here.

Department head calls incident ‘terrible’

Medical students at a Swedish university were stunned when they discovered that the subject of their first-ever autopsy was a former instructor. “I was super-shocked,” one of the students at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, said. Although it is standard practice for students to be told ahead of time who they will be autopsying, students say that did not happen in this case, and only discovered who the corpse was when they saw the toe-tag. “It was extremely unfortunate. This is the first time I have encountered something like this,” Chief Physician Birgitta Sundelin who was supervising the students, said. Department head Tina Dalianis said students need to learn to cope with it. “It is really terrible, but it is part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they must deal with it,” she said.

Why medical research can be ‘misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong’

Lose weight, live longer.

Avoid the sun, and reduce the chances of skin cancer.

Prevent Alzheimer’s disease by exercising and doing puzzles to stay mentally active.

Just when you think there are absolutes in medicine, a recent article in The Atlantic questions some basic foundations of medical science, claiming that the findings of many studies are “misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong.” In other words, doctors are relying on a system of misinformation to diagnose and treat their patients.

In the article, Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and Director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine, states that as much as 90 per cent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.

In 2005, Dr. Ioannidis published a paper that demonstrated these “flaws” mathematically. From the article in The Atlantic:

80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.

This is due to factors such as imperfect research techniques and, of course, the bias towards interesting-sounding theories and results over more plausible (but less interesting-sounding) ones.

-photo courtesy of joebeone