Abuse of Medical Students
- Bill Straw, MD
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Excerpt
To the Editor. — The most telling statistic in your recent articles on medical student abuse1-3 is that 50% of students thought their own classmates were abusive or corrupt. This indicates that abusive faculty and residents are not a product of the system, but are simply brought up through the system.
Many physicians are intelligent, goal oriented, and aggressive. A small subset of these exist in a persistent social vegetative state, from high school until the end of residency. They are shallow, one-dimensional people, and the only positive aspects of their life are the knowledge they have obtained and their position in the academic power structure in their big teaching programs.
The problem arises because these people have absolutely no interpersonal social skills. They may appear to act appropriately with patients, but it is simply role playing, a skill learned to obtain a good grade. At the end of
