When I woke up this morning and saw a post on the MUSC 2016 facebook group that accused the Worldviews in Medicine pre-reading as being evangelical Christian propaganda, I knew this day would make a good blog post.
The idea of Worldviews in Medicine was to have a seminar presenting two controversial cases to four panelists covering a range of religions - we had a naturalist surgeon, a muslim gynecologist, a rabbi, and a catholic priest all contributing their two cents to two ethical dilemma cases.
Sidenote - the class before WiM was taught by a teacher that just finished dealing with the LCME bureaucracy nightmare, and you could tell. She mentioned it was like being on anti-depressants, but I swear she was on a better high than any cracked out heroine addict I saw at the needle exchange. It's a good thing we just had a couple classes about impaired physicians.
Anyways, as soon as we got to the auditorium for WiM everyone was buzzing. We debated the %age of our class that considered themselves religious. I voted less than 50%. I still want to know some way to poll our entire class, if you have an idea - get at me. We then analyzed how to define religious. Does it make someone religious if they live in reverence to a higher power, but don't attend organized worship? Does it make someone religious if they watch every minute of every USC football game?
The panelsits got started with the first case: a pregnant mother decided to take a cosmetic acne medication that was known to cause birth defects. Presenter - "so the patient was taking Accutane, a known class X teratogen." ...wtf? We're first year med students, did you really think we know what a class X teratogen is? The consensus on the first case was that it was boring. All four panelists agreed that the mother was wrong to take this drug.
sidenote - looking around the auditorium, I'd say 25% of students are on their laptops studying histo slides or catching up on their facebook.
The second case was about deciding who does and who doesn't get health care. It was at this point the catholic priest gave the most cookie cutter Christian answer I've ever heard. Love and lord were definitely thrown around and it was supposed to resemble a coherent answer. Newsflash - just because you're a Christian, every other word out of your mouth does not need to be Jesus. There are days I am embarrassed to be a Christian.. but I'll leave this topic alone.. for now.
At this point the Rabbi jumped in with his story that a Chinese man has kept himself alive for the past 14 years with a MacGyver'd dialysis machine. WHAT? That was proceeded by:
half-baked idea: Is Christianity even a different "worldview" than Judaism? I feel like if you get any group of four religiously affiliated people, they're going to have a similar worldview. What if we just rounded up the four most interesting and opinionated students in our class, got them some beer and just let them debate over controversial ethical questions:
You volunteer at a homeless shelter/clinic, one of your dying patients says she wants to get hammered one last time before she dies. What do you do?
WiM is great idea, and I respect all the people behind the scenes that organized this afternoon. Still, at the end of the day WiM is just another administrative event. I believe in bottom-up change. Like Intraprofessional Day before it, there's only so much you can learn in class. If it's really important to us that we have better interprofessional communication or serious introspection into our worldviews it starts with drinking beers and talking a lot of shit. Good luck.
See you on the other side,
from ken
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