Doctors save lives, but they can sometimes be insufferable know-it-alls who bully nurses and do not listen to patients. Medical schools have traditionally done little to screen out such flawed applicants or to train them to behave better, but that is changing.
At Virginia Tech Carilion, the nation’s newest medical school, administrators decided against relying solely on grades, test scores and hourlong interviews to determine who got in. Instead, the school invited candidates to the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical.
The new process has enormous consequences not only for the lives of the applicants but, its backers hope, also for the entire health care system. It is called the multiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States ”” including those at Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cincinnati ”” and 13 in Canada are using it.
My neurosurgeon and choir mate (we sat next to each other – first tenor) was an excellent diagnostician. He was the only doctor to correctly diagnose my cervical spine issues after 5 years of misdiagnosis, and the one doctor that was able to deduce that my wife had multiple sclerosis (after 20+ years of – you are just depressed, just have PMS, nothing wrong with you, etc.). I once told him he should write a text book on how to diagnose, and he said he didn’t need to, that all a doctor needed to do was to “listen to the patient, spend more than 2 minutes on examination, and stop relying so much on test results.†He said that a patient knows their body, what’s normal, and what isn’t. He often found that many radiologist reports on MRIs, CAT scans, x-rays were simply wrong, and that a doctor needed to look at the scans, and not just rely on the report. He wasn’t knocking the radiologists, but that at many commercial imaging sites, you had radiologists that were overworked, only getting to spend a short time reviewing the scans, and they were not necessarily an expert in any one area.
He had many doctors (some from big name Texas medical schools) that would send patients to him for a second (or third) opinion. Many times he was able to prevent needless surgery after determining their symptoms were from something else besides a slipped disc.
Sadly, my doc passed away early last year after battling cancer. We had moved away, but I got to see him from time to time. The last time I saw him was two months before he died. He was still trying to work as much as possible, and he was as cheerful as ever. Instead of being bitter or depressed, he said that he had learned that what God expected of him during this time was to be thankful, not to complain, and to continue to live each day as the best day ever.