Perspectives
A Word From the President
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
What Americans think about medical schools and teaching hospitals
by Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC President and CEO
“That’s when I knew I wanted to be a doctor”
by Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC President and CEO
Viewpoints
Monday, August 13, 2018
“Until one day I stood on a bridge, looking down”
by Leonard Su, MD
A physician sounds the alarm on mental illness and his own escape from the depths of despair.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Should pregnant women be included in clinical trials?
by Julie Kim, MD, PhD
Each year, millions of pregnant women worldwide face a difficult decision: Should they take a medication — often for serious conditions like depression or cancer — based on slim evidence about its safety and effectiveness during pregnancy, or should they forgo the medication and risk possible danger to themselves or the child they might bear?
Seema Verma, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), was returning to Washington, D.C., after a weekend with her family when she received a panicked call from her daughter. Her family had been waiting for a connecting flight home to Indianapolis, Indiana, when Verma’s husband collapsed and stopped breathing.
“If it weren’t for the bystanders and the first responders at the airport, my kids would’ve watched their father die,” Verma told an audience at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in March 2018. Unfortunately, because his health care records weren’t immediately available, those first responders and the medical team at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania knew almost nothing about his medical history. Verma tried desperately to round up the information they needed, making calls back to her husband’s doctors in Indianapolis. Over the next week, doctors eventually discovered the cause of his cardiac arrest and successfully treated him. But even when her husband was finally released, getting the records from his weeklong treatment transferred to his doctors back home was a struggle.
Academic Medicine in the News
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Medical school takes part in suicide prevention
September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School is participating by providing resources and training for students and creating a display of more than 400 flags on campus to represent the 42,000 deaths from suicide each year in the United States.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
University launches physician-scientist-in-residence program
Virginia Commonwealth University School for the Arts has named their first physician-scientist-in-residence as part of an ongoing collaboration between the School of the Arts and the School of Medicine that aims to help improve medical education and advance patient care by solving problems with art and design.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
‘Evil’ proteins are a force for good
Researchers at the University of Arizona Cancer Center have shown that estrogen enhances the production of the EVL protein (pronounced “evil”), which helps stop the spread of breast cancer to other parts of the body. This finding could lead to more precise treatments for breast cancer patients.
