Founded at Columbia University in the early 2000s, narrative medicine asserts that asking and responding to patient’s questions in a dignified, compassionate, and generous way requires a clinician to have not only have medical know-how, but narrative intelligence and dedicated training.
For more than 18,000 aspiring Indian physicians—the most significant international contingent in Ukraine—the lure of affordable, quality medical education in Ukraine is quickly unraveling into a nightmare. Marooned by Russia’s invasion and a lack of med school space available for them in their home country, many now find their medical education journeys paused. Worse consequences may be on the way.
Aside from dentists, med students in the U.S. have the largest student loan debts out of all American college graduates and are well ahead of fellow future physicians, internationally. Last year, the median loan debt for medical students was around $207,000; a figure that had increased $40,000 since 2009. Over the last 12 years, that’s a rate three times faster than inflation.
For decades, young physicians in the United States have entered the medical workforce woefully underprepared to deal with, and treat, opioid addiction. Though recent years have seen addiction medicine receive increasing recognition and support, opioid overdose numbers continue to skyrocket.
Though few of this year’s medical residency applicants were even alive in 1992, it is emerging as an increasingly pivotal year in recent history. Though not as well recognized by pop culture—or even recent medical history—the year also marked the end of an old era in American residency matching, and the start of a new one.
On February 11, it was announced that the COMLEX-USA Level 2-PE was “postponed indefinitely.” With the end of the USMLE Step 2 CS exam just two weeks before, American medical education now finds itself in an uncertain new era of standardized clinical skills testing.