Latest / Health Ethics Podcast / A Sociologist and a Philosopher Talk Medical Education
Transcript
- 0:10Welcome to the COVID Ethics Series podcast, a conversation with leading experts about bioethical
- 0:15issues that have been exacerbated due to the COVID nineteen pandemic. I'm Brian Pilkington,
- 0:21and I teach bioethics at Setonhall University and at the Hackensack Marinian School of
- 0:25Medicine. I moderate the COVID Ethics Series in cooperation with the IHS Library and
- 0:30IHS Student Life. This podcast is a spin off collaboration with the IHS Library
- 0:36where we'll have the opportunity to go deep with the experts from our series.
- 0:41Thanks for joining our conversation. Thank you for joining us. This is the
- 0:55COVID Ethics Series podcast. My name is Brian Pilkington, and I teach ethics
- 1:00at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and at Seton Hall University in the School
- 1:03of Health, of Medical Sciences and the College of Nursing. It is my
- 1:07great pleasure to be speaking with Frederick Hafferty today. Fred Hafferty is Professor Emeritus
- 1:14of Medical Education at the Mayo Clinic. He's also Professor of Meritus at the
- 1:18University of Minnesota Medical School. Adjunct professor at Yale University and currently Senior Fellow
- 1:25at the ACGM. Fred, thank you for joining me. My pleasure,
- 1:29Brian, looking forward to the conversation. So, Fred, you have written
- 1:34a ton and so much around medical education. But I am sure that just
- 1:40about everybody who pops on this call, students, faculty, folks interested in
- 1:45ethical questions around COVID, will know you, for better or worse, as
- 1:49the person the father of the person who found the hidden and created the hidden
- 1:55curriculum in medical education. So you drew medical age educator. There's attention to
- 2:00this geez over thirty years ago now, and I think at least one in
- 2:06three, anecdotally, one in three conversations I have about what we can do
- 2:10to fix medical education always comes back to the hidden curriculum. So the impact
- 2:15has been overwhelming. Because of the kind of podcast this is. I want
- 2:22to ask a sort of broader question which is coming out of this What does
- 2:28sociology broadly have to do with medical education and can it fix medical education?
- 2:37Not much? I don't know if you want me to be sustinct in terms
- 2:46of answering the question, what does it have? What does sociology have to
- 2:53do with medical education formally speaking, in other words, does it have a
- 3:00formal presence? And I think the answer is no. And in terms of
- 3:09fixing again that people in medical education turning to either sociologist or sociological frameworks for
- 3:22fixing medical education, I think the answer is no. There as well,
- 3:34that wasn't always the case. In the nineteen fifties, sociology as sociology and
- 3:46sociologist as sociologist meaning identified as a sort of card caring members faculty in sociology
- 3:55departments were very much involved in issues of medical education, both in terms of
- 4:04contributing to its subject wise, but also in terms of studying it. So
- 4:12two very notable sociologists, not medical sociologists that didn't exist yet, sociologist Robert
- 4:21K. Merton from Columbia and Howard Becker, were involved in major studies of
- 4:32medical education. But what sometimes gets overlooked is that Merton and his team and
- 4:44his team spawned a number of very notable medical sociologist Sam Bloom in a Fox,
- 4:53how Gear was looking at medical education as a place from which to examine
- 5:09the theoretical framework of structural functionalism. Meanwhile, I ever see Hughes and under
- 5:17him Howard Becker wound up doing the same kind of study different school Kansas,
- 5:29from a symbolic interactionist perspectives. So you had these two major studies that did
- 5:40have a lot of impact on medical education, but they were headed up by
- 5:46medical sociologists that Becker in many respects and Merton in many respects never returned to
- 5:55issues of medical education. It is just the place where they were looking to
- 6:00examine issues for me, in structural functionalism, Pubecker symbolic interaction and this sort
- 6:08of warring frameworks or competing frameworks for examining social phenomena in this case medical education.
- 6:18So heavy involvement early on and then in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen
- 6:29seventies, and I'm almost identifying a sociological way of thinking about things that starts
- 6:35with history. How do we locate whatever it is we're talking about, where
- 6:41did it come from? And one of the places that anything comes from has
- 6:45to do with time. There was an effort by Robert Strauss in setting up
- 6:54the first department of behavioral science in a medical school in the country at the
- 6:59Universe City of Minnesota, and Bob had a particular vision and version of what
- 7:08would represent this thing that he liked to refer to in a singular as behavioral
- 7:14science, not the behavioral sciences, but behavioral science. And that was a
- 7:24framework while looking at issues of health, social factors and health and the like,
- 7:33using three primary disciplines sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology. And Bob
- 7:42structured his department around those three disciplines and faculty representing those three disciplines. And
- 7:49it was Bob's hope that over time this thing, behavioral science would populate across
- 7:58medical schools in the US and come to represent a way that the sciences social
- 8:07sciences within medicine medical education would be represented by a departmental structure, so having
- 8:20a physical and organizational place in the medical schools. And long story short,
- 8:30as far as I'm concerned, it didn't work. There was a rise,
- 8:35There was a national organization Association Behavioral Science and Medical Education. There was a
- 8:43journal associated with that organization. There was population national boards had a behavioral science
- 8:50segment. All these kinds of institutionalization factors that said things were moving in the
- 8:58right action. But over time and for a variety of reasons that it lacked
- 9:05traction, and bit by bit it disappeared There is only now one department of
- 9:13behavioral science left in the country, and that's at the University of Kentucky.
- 9:16But it's structured far differently than it was when Bob Strauss initially put this into
- 9:24action. So long story in which, at one point in time, sociology
- 9:31formally was to be part of a trilogy of academic disciplines that was supposed to
- 9:39have an important impact on both the content and the consequences of medical education,
- 9:46so sociologically informed graduates of medical school. But it didn't happen over time.
- 10:00Yeah, I think that the history is super helpful and clean this up for
- 10:05me. So I've got this sort of rough and ready sketch. We've got
- 10:09sociologists externally right, thinking about medical education as an interesting set of subject matter,
- 10:15sort of stage one, stage two. Then right, we've got actually
- 10:20this realization that future physicians, or maybe we'll speak more broadly, future healthcare
- 10:26practitioners would benefit from a sociological understanding. And then so it moves into and
- 10:33this is where I need the correction. It moves into the aims are for
- 10:37formal curriculum to involve or help students in framing the world sociologically. Is that
- 10:43yes, yes, and that was going to be the legitimation everything that you
- 10:50were just articulating and doing so much better than me. It's and I mean,
- 10:56this is super interesting now because you're talking about fifty sixties, seventies,
- 11:01and it's it's interesting to think about the role that and I know this is
- 11:07not a new concept, but maybe you can speak to it the role that
- 11:09the social determinants of health are playing now in medical education and broader ethics conversations
- 11:18with earlier roots, or even just the constant discussion within medical education of the
- 11:24importance of teams and TeamWorks in light of the idea that this is a little
- 11:28bit sloppy, but physicians, nurses, speech language pathologists aren't delivering carret.
- 11:33The team delivers the care. So it seems like, I mean, help
- 11:39us think through were these good ideas to have students thinking sociologically but didn't pan
- 11:45out? Did they sort of pendulum swing one way and then come back now?
- 11:48Sort of? Yeah, give us a take. That's a great way
- 11:56to flame it. Give us a take, because I don't think I have
- 12:01any particular deep insights, but your rearticulation and a better articulation than I gave
- 12:16you does take us back to the hidden curriculum framework, because what happened to
- 12:26Bob's dream, And again, it was a dream built around three different subject
- 12:33areas. And by the way, that first department, which was my first
- 12:37job, also did have somebody in it who taught ethics. It wasn't part
- 12:46of Bob's triumphrate, so to speak, of sociology, anthropolitan and clinical psychology,
- 12:54but it was there. But what went wrong? It ran into the
- 13:00hidden curriculum. It ran it behavioral science, ran into the structure and the
- 13:11culture of medical education. And in spite of the fact that Bob was able
- 13:16to get it, it behavioral science into the curriculum. Well, what else
- 13:24was in the curriculum? What was I teaching up against? Wow? I
- 13:31actually was teaching a course called medical sociology in my first job, because that
- 13:37course had already existed prior to my coming on board. But when was it
- 13:45scheduled? Scheduled against anatomy and biochemistry? Well, who's going to spend their
- 13:54time studying about medical sociology when there are all of these more important things?
- 14:01Well? Who said they were more important? The structure and the processes within
- 14:07the school itself? And so we had. There were so many different messaging
- 14:18that went on within the curriculum. We had a course called Conjoint Sciences and
- 14:28I can't remember, let's say it was once a month where all of the
- 14:31basic sciences and the clinician and a patient came together around some clinical problem,
- 14:37with everybody getting to weigh in on how their subject matter. So again,
- 14:43all of these discipline based subjects, biochemistry, physiology, pathology, what those
- 14:54subject areas had to say about this particular clinical scenario. Okay, when did
- 15:03behavioral science when was it slotted within that space last always? So did you
- 15:16always have time to talk? No, Sometimes that time just ran out,
- 15:24or you got to say, Van, there is behavioral science relevancy here and
- 15:30that was all you got to say. So maybe that's what got me interested
- 15:37in a very practical way. I'll give you another one since you were talking
- 15:41about ethics. But that's that's how I think Bob's dream came face to face
- 15:52with his success was being able to have the department, a formal department in
- 16:00the medical school. Good for him even for equal space and equal time and
- 16:08the curriculum, but the time versus how that time played itself out, And
- 16:18it's competing spaces made for a very uphill climb, so super helpful and it's
- 16:30really interesting, um, the interplay between sort of associate well and again being
- 16:37sloppy and forgive me, but sociological content and then the sociological reflections about sociological
- 16:45content of medical education, then the sociological reflections on medical education, and so
- 16:52yeah, the kinds of things you think about just when of course gets scheduled
- 16:56for right, things that seem so basic or what it's up against. What
- 17:00so suppose things had worked out differently? Oh see, there you go,
- 17:07right, So well, Louise, I'll take a step back because this is
- 17:10a sort of gazing in a way, But what if things had worked out
- 17:15differently, if they had gone well for your colleague's dream, What was supposed
- 17:22to be the benefit for future physicians? What was the good right? What
- 17:27was the virtue of medical education for having behavioral sciences? Or right? That's
- 17:34something else in the placeholder focus on sociology or ethics or professionalism. I mean,
- 17:41I'll tell you a story about how important it is for physicians to be
- 17:44ethical, and I think I have good arguments there, But what was thinking
- 17:48sociologically supposed to do? I think it was supposed as medicine was being both
- 18:03praised and criticized. This always in many cases I should say two sides to
- 18:11any particular story. So, as medicine was being praised for the wholescale advances
- 18:22in science, I was born and I am old. I was born before
- 18:30antibiotics were widely available within the public patient population. I mean they existed,
- 18:41for sure, but in terms of being widely available or born before polio vaccines
- 18:48or any so, the the imagination or what science could do was incredible back
- 19:02in the fifties and the sixties, and what we were going to be able
- 19:08to conquer and the impact on both life and well being within the counterveiling question
- 19:22of yes, but are we losing the human element? How are we going
- 19:30to connect science to society, to the different And it was recognized back then
- 19:37the differential impact of healthcare on different populations within society, so social factors in
- 19:48health and disease. That was one thing that the behavioral sciences were supposed to
- 19:56better inform, not just medical students, but medicine at large, to better
- 20:03appreciate that. As science dashed forward, it seems like everything was at the
- 20:11speed of light. That they not forget the social context within which all of
- 20:18this was supposed to play itself out. So we might come up with all
- 20:23kinds of cures, but how are we going to be able to deliver any
- 20:29of this? Fast forward two three years ago COVID and on the one hand,
- 20:41vaccine development incredible. Wow, how could it have been done faster?
- 20:49And yes, I know there was foundations had been built all the way along
- 20:52blah blah blah blah blah blah. But where was the rub? The rub
- 20:59was in terms of setting up the distribution for vaccines. It was getting the
- 21:06supplies out there, It was convincing people that the vaccines were good. It
- 21:12was so many social even if you wanted to call it social engineering, but
- 21:18social factors was the rub. So here we are. Well, let's see
- 21:27fifty years post this notion that behavioral sciences and or social factors in health and
- 21:37disease are important, and we're still watching the social aspects of things being in
- 21:48some respects far more consequenceal or far more problematic than the science side of the
- 21:55equation. So we can come up with all kinds of elegant solutions, but
- 22:00we can't or we have more difficulty putting them into practice, and now that
- 22:06so much of healthcare has been politicized. On the one hand, it's a
- 22:11healthcare nitemia. On the end of hand, it's a sociological fantasy. It's
- 22:18like, wow, look at what we get to try and understand now,
- 22:27yeah, yeah, I mean, there's there's so much here. My questions
- 22:30are pulling me in two sort of very separate directions. One is sort of
- 22:36the medical education focus. So what kinds of things do we want medical students
- 22:41to know? In terms of this, right, where are the fights that
- 22:48the sociologically informed or even the sociologists who's interested in medical education wants to really
- 22:55say, no, no, I'm putting my foot down. This has to
- 22:56be in the formal curriculum them, right, the fight for actually what institutions
- 23:03say matters. So that's one set of questions, right what really needs to
- 23:07And the other set of questions has to do with broad questions of medicine and
- 23:11society. And I mean, should medical students, should physicians be worried about
- 23:18some of these kinds of things or is it just beyond their scope I mean,
- 23:23not official scope of practice, But isn't I mean, whether vaccines don't
- 23:30scientists develop the vaccines, and the delivery has to do with you know,
- 23:33folks who understand how supply chains work in all this interesting collective action problem.
- 23:38But it's yeah, So two sets of questions. Pick one. You want
- 23:42to go medical education and you want to fix the ills of society. First,
- 23:52I guess I feel more comfortable, but perhaps I shouldn't within medical education.
- 24:00And I'll try to be somewhat sociological and answering your question of is it
- 24:10important to have some understanding of the social determinants of health and disease? And
- 24:18then the operative word in there is some and how much and of what kind?
- 24:25Etc. And as you were asking the bigger questions, I wasn't don't
- 24:37know why. I was reflecting on how might it come to be that I
- 24:47would adopt And since I'm a sociologist, I'll just say sociological framework, but
- 24:52there could be anthropology and there there could be psychology. How might I come
- 24:59to do this well? With great difficulty, because if somehow I wanted to
- 25:10obtain some in depth or specialized insights into sociology and what they might have to
- 25:21say about issues of either medical education or health and disease, how would I
- 25:26go about doing it. I could get an mdphd. I could be a
- 25:34physician sociologist. Do you know how many mdphds there are with a PhD is
- 25:42in sociology relative to other kinds of disciplinary threads, And it's a rhetorical question
- 25:56which I can safely answer, not many. Do I know the numbers?
- 26:02No, I don't, But I do know that if you were to apply
- 26:10to an MD PhD program, which by the way, has benefits, and
- 26:17that now your tuition cost etc. Are for medical school or nil, you're
- 26:26part of a a financially supported degree track program mdphd. So I go looking
- 26:40around the sea. Because I really am interested in sociology, which makes me
- 26:45an odd vault to begin with, I go looking around for mdphd programs where
- 26:49I where that program track within the medical school has formal relations with the Department
- 26:57of sociology, and where I can pursue that track. Not many, many
- 27:07more opportunities within what I'm going to call the biomedical sciences and different aspects of
- 27:17genetics. So my ability to track in that direction is severely hampered by a
- 27:27lack of pathways. Oh well, fine, so let's just say and I
- 27:34have a bit of an academic orientation, and so I'm going to pick up
- 27:41a PhD in sociology post my medical training. Well, I've gone to medical
- 27:48school, I've gone to residency, and then because I have a bit of
- 27:52an academic orientation, somewhat subspecializing, and then I'm going to pick up a
- 27:57fellowship And now I'm seven years out and I have crushing let's use that word,
- 28:07crushing debt. And now I'm going to go out to where get a
- 28:14PhD in sociology and pay somebody else but that degree or it doesn't work there
- 28:22is the system isn't set up for me to be an MD PhD sociologist.
- 28:30So I can get some back to my words, some understanding of course here,
- 28:38of course there, But I can't. I can't do anything. I
- 28:47can do deep dives only with great difficulty. Maybe. And now I'm being
- 28:56snarky and intentionally snark I'm independently wealthy. I don't have to worry about all
- 29:03this kind of stuff. But if I'm coming from populations groups that fall under
- 29:17or have some relationship with the downsides of social factors and health and disease,
- 29:23so underrepresented groups, etc. You've just had multiple barriers go up. It's
- 29:36almost unimaginable. And I'm going to do this, this kind of thing where
- 29:41I'm going to develop some sociological framework. Anyway, ask me another question,
- 29:52So super helpun you've I don't know how helpful, but you're pushing my thinking.
- 30:00Why would anybody in their right mind want to be an MD sociologist?
- 30:06Well, let me phrase the phrase of the question, or sort of push
- 30:11the conversation in this direction. Please save me from myself from your points before,
- 30:18right, I mean, so COVID has been terrible and sort of pervasively
- 30:23terrible. All sorts of folks have been affected by it, and many since
- 30:27you mentioned marginalized communities, many folks from marginalized communities affected even worse. Right,
- 30:32so pre existing ills exacerbated in COVID. We've got this history in medical
- 30:37education of thinking about the social determinants of help in the sixties. It's now
- 30:44become more common, we'll say, for folks to talk about this. Suppose
- 30:48someone who's interesting going to the medicals because says medical school, says I want
- 30:52to fix what happened with COVID. I don't want this to happen again.
- 30:56And they think, well, we should get a vaccine. But then unfortunately
- 31:00they bump into Frend Hafferty and he points out all of these sociological or sorry,
- 31:04all these social challenges, right, So yeah, he's a bummer,
- 31:08he's got a negative orientation here. Oh I all right, here's a question
- 31:15for your group and a potential for a study. Early on, let's just
- 31:26say midpoint in the past three years, so year by year and a half
- 31:30ago, we were starting to hear about the Boucy effect in terms of medical
- 31:38education, and that is the increase in applications to medical school as individual supposedly
- 31:52for the increase in applications just there, and the speculation that that preas is
- 32:00being driven by the Fauci effect, now putting it air quotes surround it,
- 32:06because then the interpretation and that is the concern with the public health side of
- 32:17the COVID catastrophe, and that more understanding and more work needs to be done
- 32:28on that side of the equation. Okay, that's a hypothesis that whether it's
- 32:38it's Boucy as a symbol or as a person. People saying, and I'm
- 32:45being somewhat glib again, be like Mike, be like Fauci. Okay,
- 32:55is that the case we can go, we can do a prospective study and
- 33:05start looking at that bump and applications and perhaps first step any differences and emissions
- 33:15with respect to where that bump was coming from. Let's just say that the
- 33:21bump was coming from applicants who had more of a social determinants of health orientation.
- 33:31All right, did this lead? So that's first question, first answer,
- 33:39And then let's say the answer to that is yes, yes, more
- 33:45applicants with a social factors and health and disease orientation, and more acceptances extended
- 33:54to those people. So now we have a new cohort coming in a cohort
- 34:02bump into medical education. How does that play itself out within the context of
- 34:10medical education. Does that bump collectively somehow impact on what goes on in the
- 34:19medical education context. Does it challenge traditional educational practices? Does it? Do
- 34:25they serve as a disruptive force? Can you see measure account for changes within
- 34:35education their education or the education of subsequent cohorts? Second, or third or
- 34:45fourth, I've lost track of the number? Is well, how many more
- 34:52people going of those going to public health? I mean, we have had
- 34:58a traditional structure within this country of public health being a second class citizen within
- 35:06the overall healthcare community. And it's there tertiary care or more hospitals, there
- 35:22outpatient clinics, and then there's the kind of community health, and there's the
- 35:27public health. And so are more people going in you can count? You
- 35:34can? Are they more md MPH programs and more than just Masters of public
- 35:44health programs? How has masters and doctoral degrees in public health changed post COVID?
- 35:52Have they reoriented themselves in terms of what's seen as important and what it
- 36:00means to be a public health professional. We can look at all of those
- 36:05kinds of things, and as far as I'm concerned, those are all very
- 36:08sociological questions, all driven by this impart speculation, And I think it is
- 36:15speculation that, oh, we have a Fauci effect going on in the in
- 36:23the arena of medical education. Well, I would think that in about maybe
- 36:30this isn't exciting, but in about fifteen to twenty years we will have an
- 36:34answer to that question, or we will have answers plural since I don't believe
- 36:38in an answer to just about anything. But oh, we haven't even gotten
- 36:45around to the issue of does anybody think that this is important? To study.
- 36:52Maybe not. Maybe it just happens or doesn't happen, and nobody knows
- 36:58whether it happens or doesn't because it's not considered to be an important question.
- 37:02I think it is, but I'm not going to be here in twenty years,
- 37:07so it well, I agree with you. I think it is.
- 37:14And it's not just you. There's probably the three, four or five dissertations
- 37:17that could be written by folks who might hear this and say I really want
- 37:22to do that mg PhD in sociology, or just I want to think about
- 37:24these sociologically, but what about super helpful good background? And maybe we do
- 37:31get more folks interested in training and becoming physicians in light of the Fauci effects.
- 37:37Maybe they push for additional content or different kinds of content to better inform
- 37:44them wherever they want to go. And that's where I want to pull us
- 37:46back to it. So pressure on an already packed formal curriculum, not maybe
- 37:55by just the students who say, hey, I want to be about you.
- 38:00That's how I want to fix it, but just who want to be
- 38:01or who are of the mindset to be more sociologically informed. So being sociologically
- 38:09informed means understanding just what you were saying, that the formal curriculum is a
- 38:16contestable and contested space. You have only so many hours. However, they
- 38:27can be allocated and then configured within the allocation. We were talking earlier about,
- 38:35well, where within the curriculum do you appear up against whom you know,
- 38:42by the way, just to have fun. When don't you want to
- 38:47teach? What's some time slots during the day that at the No, I
- 38:55don't want to teach that. That's the kiss of that. That's the curriculum
- 39:00slot kiss of death. Every slot is a welcome slot. I mean,
- 39:07you know this. They're all great, but it's I'm having fun. I'm
- 39:13just teaching. No, this is good because I used to think it was
- 39:17right after lunch. I don't want to be teaching right every else, but
- 39:21I have got to learn it's actually in my limited experience relative to other classes
- 39:29and courses the students have and that content. So if there's an exam somewhere
- 39:34else the week before the week after, I don't want the big ethics lecture
- 39:38then, because that's just not when folks are so I think it's relative to
- 39:43what else is going on. I like that answer relative to what's going on.
- 39:49Back to the contested space, I mean faculty, as much as they
- 39:53might moan and groan about how many hours they have to teach and all of
- 39:59those kinds of things, they'll fight over curricular time in part because it's viewed
- 40:07as a marker of either their personal importance or into the importance of their discipline
- 40:19within the medical education space. So one thing that has been a constant in
- 40:27medical education has from for me since the seventies, but I'm sure it goes
- 40:32back further, has been fights over who gets what kinds of space within the
- 40:40curriculum. So back to Bob Strouds big victory. He got space within Kentucky's
- 40:46curriculum for his projects behavioral science where it didn't exist before, and he couldn't
- 40:54point to any place else and say, well, have it's doing it,
- 40:57so you know we can do it. No, it wasn't doing it.
- 41:01But it doesn't make any difference what the topic is. When I came into
- 41:10medical education, hot topic and my dissertation was on it, so help me
- 41:15get hired. Death and dying. Everybody had to have a death and dying
- 41:22or you know, anacology whatever was going to be called had to have it.
- 41:28Find me a medical school. Maybe they exist, but not many.
- 41:34You know, sociologists like to rummage around abroad numbers. So I'm just gonna
- 41:38say, find me a medical school it has a death and dying course today,
- 41:45And if they do, it's under constant attack because now pick your subject,
- 41:52climate change, diversity, oh, social terminants of whatever it might be.
- 42:02You keep on nutrition. We have to be teaching our students about nutrition.
- 42:10And part of teaching about nutrition is what and this is something we have
- 42:15been talking about earlier, meaning before today, Prian, How does students know
- 42:23it's important? Yes, it's important for integrate a curriculum to integrate things,
- 42:32which is in some cases another way of saying make relevant. But part of
- 42:38the way that students know that the school is telling them it's important is that
- 42:45there's a course with this name, so so factors in climate health and let's
- 42:52kill two birds with one stone now, and that somehow they're examined on it.
- 42:59You know, it's is another hidden curriculum factor. It's like, well,
- 43:02it's not just at this subject, are you testing us on this?
- 43:07And it's not just that the school's testing Well, there's this thing, step
- 43:12one, step two is it on the boards, And all of these are
- 43:19sources of messaging about importance. And so okay, fine, it's it's nice
- 43:30because I don't want to use the word important again. It's nice that climate
- 43:34change has a presence today that it didn't have twenty years ago. And whether
- 43:40it makes it into the front lines or maybe the second line of curricular content,
- 43:50the battles are going to continue. That is a constant for me of
- 43:54medical education is fights over what should be in the curriculum and therefore what needs
- 44:02to go. And I was hired to teach a death and dying course which
- 44:09maybe lasted, perhaps because of my bad teaching, another three or four years,
- 44:15and it got replaced by something more important. Noah, death isn't important
- 44:23enough anymore. We have to find something else now. Of course, the
- 44:28whole topic of death and dying keeps on being we visited home. We need
- 44:31to figure out better ways to facilitate dying, and and there are waves in
- 44:42the popularity or the visibility of certain topics. I'll stop. Yeah, no,
- 44:49no, that's that's how we'll It's going to be a bit cheeky.
- 44:52But you can't be that old because I actually taught a course called death and
- 44:58Dying within the last few years. Yeah, yeah, that was good.
- 45:06That was good. But it was under the auspices of a philosophy department as
- 45:10a medical ethics course. It's not in a medical oh a cripple kiss of
- 45:15death, the goosophy medical ethics, and then we come to the topic definitely.
- 45:21Yeah, so that but not, to your point, not in a
- 45:23medical school. And we're oh, geez I see, not in a medical
- 45:27school. No, no, no, this isn't under the auspices of a
- 45:30philosophy department in a separate of the related um institution. So this is UM.
- 45:37It's interesting, and I'm I'm going to get you out on one question
- 45:40because I just saw the time. I mean, it's too interesting to talk
- 45:43to you where we're running out of time. But this has been thank you,
- 45:45this has been so helpful. We've got historical framing of sociology externally thinking
- 45:51about medical education than the importance of sociological thinking that might be too much.
- 45:55Understanding social factors within um within medical education as a way to improve patient care.
- 46:04Pendulum swings back and forth. What folks care about hidden curriculum, formal
- 46:07curriculum, I mean this is in some ways, I think, the first
- 46:12of a master class, right because we might have raised more questions than we've
- 46:15answered. But Fred Thanking, this has been super Helvil. You're gonna have
- 46:20to let me con you into coming back on so we can pick up some
- 46:23of the hidden curriculum themes, themes about marginalized populations, the formal curriculum.
- 46:29I mean, there's there's so much here, and it's so interesting to think
- 46:31about how all of this gets I need a better you know, metah,
- 46:37but sort of thrown into the blender and coming out in a way that patient
- 46:42care is improved, right, because that's what folks really want. And then
- 46:45there's all these fights to sort of get it going. But leave us,
- 46:49leave us in the audience with a final epic thought, what I know,
- 46:53I know what? Or give us an epic thought, what are they going
- 46:58to be thinking about until the next time they hear you ask him a question,
- 47:00tell him to read something. UM, what's leave us with with a
- 47:05homework assignment? A homework assignment? UM that is a copy I I'm I'm
- 47:24not inclined to say anything about ah, anything that I've written. UM,
- 47:37I'm trying to come up with and I'm just blocking on the exact ah ah
- 47:57um, I'm coming up with. Oh, I want to come up with
- 48:12the title of a article that I would like to suggest to everybody, and
- 48:23bear with me since I wasn't at all prepared for this one due to the
- 48:30failures of the host who invited you on. Um bretty, you can just
- 48:36say anything Brian's written. That's fine, there's no all right, well,
- 48:45oh I happened, since I know all of this can be all us dead
- 48:52space. Well, ye take your time a week. We thank Allison for
- 48:59around thing. I mean you, well, I just wanted to an ending
- 49:05thought or question and we can edit out the homework assignment bit too. Or
- 49:09I mean you mentioned Renee Fox before you tell folks to go read. We've
- 49:14got um. I've always liked Pulse Stars social Determinants, not such Social Transformation
- 49:22of American Medicine. You're hidding. Curriculum paper is great, um, but
- 49:25I can plug all those um after two. I mean the ah the Social
- 49:37Transformation of America Medicine has a wonderful subtitle that sometimes gets forgotten, and now
- 49:45I'm blocking on that as well, The Rise of the Solemn Profession. I
- 49:50believe sovereign sovereign thank you, yes, yes, the Rise of the sovereign
- 49:54profession and h they it has what for me is one of the great opening
- 50:07sentences of any book, that something like the dream of reason forgot to take
- 50:14power into effect. And I, um, I think that is wonderful.
- 50:23I'm I'm going to get to you. Uh whether Uh wait a second,
- 50:37here we go, Um I'm looking for yes, here it is uh so.
- 50:49The author's name is Kuma Guy Ar no A r n O k U
- 50:54m A g Ai and it's a paper an academic medicine called something like making
- 51:07Things Strange. Oh yes, making And here I'm plugging something other than sociology.
- 51:14It's called Making Strange a Role for the humanities and medical education. Two
- 51:22of my favorite writers are no Koma Guy and then the Least Were. But
- 51:30the title is very sociological in that it asks you to take accepted wisdom and
- 51:44make it strange, just question it and asking in what ways is it accepted
- 51:52and should it be? And in some cases it should be, but in
- 51:55other cases it does represent vested into and power and having that mindset of being
- 52:06willing to question and reflect on what is gives you the potential for both dreaming
- 52:20and then operationalizing what should be brother worth the weight. It's super helpful suggestion,
- 52:30and unfortunately we run out of time or I mean, that's just an
- 52:35issue close to my heart and all all of what we've talked about previously on
- 52:38the need for medical education to have more philosophy in it. But that'll be
- 52:45for another time. Yes, yes, another time. Can I interview you
- 52:47on bringing philosophy to medical education? Well maybe you could. Students are telling
- 52:54me about this. You can have podcast takeovers, so you can take over
- 52:59this podcast weekend, flip the script. I think that would be wonderful because
- 53:06you've certainly opened up my mind. See the sociology part would say, looking
- 53:14at medical education, not what is there, but what isn't there? And
- 53:20that, in some sense is the null curriculum issue. And then why and
- 53:29as our conversations have been before, it seems like the constant notion of philosophy
- 53:35and medical education has more traction within UK medical education than it does US medical
- 53:43education. And so where has philosophy been and and how come it's operationalized under
- 53:52the label of ethics yea, And whether it's operationalized well or not as yet
- 53:59another question. So yes, I want to interview you about the role in
- 54:05place of philosophy in medical education. Well yeah, no, that'll be fun.
- 54:12Well we'll figure it out, but Fred, thank you so much for
- 54:15the time. Everyone you're listening to the covid Ethics podcast. I am Brian
- 54:20Pilkington and it has been my great pleasure to have Frederick Haafferty on Father of
- 54:23the Hidden Curriculum and I'm not rereading the amazing bio, but please do check
- 54:29out the article that he suggested making Strange a role for the humanities medical education,
- 54:35as well as his paper on the HIDD curriculum I think from ninety four,
- 54:38but we'll make sure all of the links are posted on the website.
- 54:43So thanks for tuning in and Fred, thanks for the time, my pleasure.
- 54:46See you later. Thank you for listening to this episode of the covid
- 54:51Ethics series podcast. Be sure to check out video versions of our episodes online
- 54:55at library dot dot eedu slash covid ethics, follow the show on Twitter at
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