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News

Anatomy teaching in United Kingdom is in crisis, new report says

BMJ 2007; 334 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39080.510394.DB (Published 04 January 2007) Cite this as: BMJ 2007;334:12

Rapid Response:

Re: A very Grave offence.

Andy Wood provides no evidence to support his assertion that: ' All
the communication skills needed, can be found in everyday life', nor does
he explain why, if this is the case, medical schools have historically
devoted large amounts of their students' time to that exemplar of
communication with the patient, the medical history. If Andy Wood is
right then surely this could be eliminated from medical training without a
qualm and left to practise receptionists and ward clerks?

Furthermore, his apparent belief that there is a finite body of
relevant knowledge which can be acquired in medical school and then
regurgitated at need is, alas, unfounded. There may have been in T H
Huxley's day, but the world in general, and human pathogens in particular,
has moved on from then. It isn't just that medical knowledge is
incomplete; what have been regarded as matters of indisputable fact have
been shown to be straightforwardly wrong.

Consider, for example, the situation of the doctors first caring for
patients suffering from hypermutating multi-resistant lung infections.(1)
Those clinicians had been taught in medical school that, as a question of
fact, bacteria couldn't behave like that; the paradigm shift in
microbiology was yet to come. It is greatly to their credit that,
confronted with an absolute conflict between what they had been taught as
fact in medical school, and the evidence, they went with the evidence.

Of course, had they pursued Andy Wood's approach I probably wouldn't
be alive to argue with him…

Ms Stevie Gamble

1. Hypermutation Is a Key Factor in Development of Multiple-
Antimicrobial Resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Strains Causing Chronic
Lung Infections
María D. Maciá, David Blanquer, Bernat Togores, Jaume Sauleda, José L.
Pérez, and Antonio Oliver1
Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, August 2005, p. 3382-3386, Vol. 49,
No. 8
http://aac.asm.org/cgi/reprint/49/8/3382

Competing interests:
None declared

Competing interests: No competing interests

27 January 2007
Stevie Gamble
retired HMIT
EC2Y 8BL