Class of students becoming doctors virtually
Med schools teach bedside manner via video, hold remote cadaver dissections
Jerrel Catlett’s eyes narrowed on the large intestine, a gloppy, glow sticklike object whose color matched the stool stored inside of it. He chose to isolate the organ, and it expanded on his screen as the body parts surrounding it receded — the gall bladder bright green with bile, the ribs white and curved like half-moons.
“My old boss used to tell me that when I did this, I’d be so wowed by how complex the human body is,” said Catlett, 25, a first-year student at
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, gesturing to the image of a body on his laptop screen. “But it feels like there’s something missing from the experience right now.”
For generations, medical students were initiated to their training by a ritual as gory as it was awe-inducing: the cadaver dissection. Since at least the 14th century, physicians have honed their understanding of human anatomy by examining dead bodies. But amid the coronavirus pandemic, the cadaver dissection — like many hands-on aspects of the medical curriculum — turned virtual, using a three-dimensional simulation software.
Of the country’s 155 medical schools, a majority transitioned at least part of their first- and second-year curricula to remote learning during the pandemic. Nearly three-quarters offered lectures virtually, according to a survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges, and 40% used virtual platforms to teach students how to interview patients about their symptoms and take their medical histories. Though the cadaver dissection posed a trickier challenge, nearly 30% of medical schools, including Mount Sinai, used online platforms to teach anatomy.
Though medical students in many states have been eligible for and able to receive the vaccines, some have not yet fully shifted back to in-person learning, with school administrators saying they preferred to wait until COVID-19 case rates decline further. Some in-person training, like practicing clinical skills, has largely resumed.
Medical schools adapted in the past year with inventive approaches to clinical training. Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Stanford used virtual reality technology to teach anatomy. The Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University offered students the opportunity to shadow doctors virtually, sitting in on telemedicine appointments.
The Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California, opted to have faculty members dissect cadavers while wearing body cameras so students could watch remotely. The cadavers were also imaged using three-dimensional scanners, so students could practice manipulating the sorts of images produced by magnetic resonance imaging and CT scans.
“When the faculty came up with this, I was like,
‘Oh my goodness, this is amazing,’ ” said Dr. Donna Elliott, vice dean for medical education at Keck. “These scanned, three-dimensional images approximate the type of imaging you’ll use as a clinician.”
Educators are aware that for all the promise of new technologies, there’s a sense of loss for students
who aren’t able to be in hospitals, classrooms and dissection laboratories in person. “The classroom of the medical school is the clinical environment, and it’s so stretched right now,” said Lisa Howley, senior director for strategic initiatives and partnerships at the AAMC.
Students said they felt some frustration as they watched the pressures mount on front-line providers without any capacity to help. “We know more than the average person, but we feel generally powerless,” said Saundra Albers, 28, a second-year student at Columbia.
Both faculty members and students realize that watching organs move on a laptop screen is not the same as removing them, one by one, from a human body. “A cadaver’s body parts wouldn’t look as smooth and perfect as they do on a screen,” Catlett
said. “Let’s say the cadaver was an alcoholic, you might see liver cirrhosis with bumps and ridges covering the liver.”
He and his classmates know that they missed a medical rite of passage:
“We don’t get to feel what the tissues are like, or how hard the bones are.”
Catlett and his classmates have now been offered vaccines, and they are beginning to resume some in-person activities, including meeting with patients for the first time recently. Their lectures are still online.
Sarah Serrano Calove, 26, is a second-year student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which offered a blend of in-person and virtual learning last semester. Calove had been eager to practice interacting with patients — taking their medical histories and delivering news of diagnoses — so the
transition to learning clinical skills on Zoom was a letdown.
She was assigned to interview a medical actor, referred to as a standardized patient, about his financial troubles, an emotional conversation that she found awkward to conduct virtually.
“When you’re on Zoom, you can’t tell if the person is clenching their hands or shaking their legs,” she said. “For some of my classmates, the feedback was we had to show more empathy. But how am I supposed to make my empathy known through a computer screen?”
Some students pointed to a silver lining in their virtual medical training: They’ve become adept at speaking with patients about sensitive issues over video, a lesson likely to prove essential as the field of telemedicine expands. Through remote clerkships at schools such as Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, medical students assisted hospital staff by following up virtually with patients who had been discharged earlier than usual because of the pandemic.
“Other doctors got thrown into the deep end, but we get to practice using this technology,” said Ernesto Rojas, a secondyear student at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “We learned how to build rapport and ask the patient things like, ‘Are you in a place where you can talk privately?’ ”
Students have also said they’ve felt particularly motivated to complete their training amid the pandemic. Medical school applications are up by 18% compared with this time last year, according to the AAMC.