Spotlight: In-Training Family Medicine Articles
Today we’re starting with the website not afraid to put a hyphen in their URL, “the agora of the medical student community,” In-Training. 
If you’re interested in Family Medicine it can be hard to find websites specifically for you, and it can be time consuming and frustrating to sift through articles on broad spectrum sites. We thought it was silly for students to replicate each other’s efforts, so we’re going to do the work for you! Our new “Spotlight” articles will round-up the best Family Med articles on a popular medical site, and review them for you here.
Suffering, Empathy and Emotion in Medicine
The Legacy of The House of God – Louza compares his experience as a third year to the events of The House of God, and discusses the hidden curriculum of clinical experience. His piece should be followed by Bommarito’s exploration of The Value of Empathy in Medicine, as she navigates her loss and re-discovery of the need for empathy through various clerkships. The emotional side of medicine is further explored in Lessons in Medicine: Understanding Patient Suffering – Kelsey’s article is a must-read for all students, exploring the incongruity of our everyday lives versus the abnormality of the patient’s experience, and offers methods to address this dichotomy.
The Tough Topics
Physicians Must Help End the Cycle of Abuse – Rehman confronts medicine’s failure in confronting intimate partner violence, dicusses appropriate methods to respond and answers the most common question about domestic abuse. This is a truly great piece, highly recommended you read before clerkships begin. Move on to The Right Time to Lose a Patient – wherein Prousi reflects on the death of a patient and how he processed the experience. Meanwhile, Peters explores the dichotomy of life and death in labor in delivery in Learning to Lean In. To close out the tougher topics, Bhatt confronts the elephant in the room, What Sexism in Medicine Looks Like, with anecdotes and data about sexism that are disheartening, but a necessary read for those starting clinical experience.
The Best of the Rest of In-Training.org
Ten Lessons from Flint, part 3 of Joyce’s article discusses the role of the physician as a champion for patients, advocacy training within residency programs & fellowships and completes the series with four “lessons” on the topic. In Choosing Family Medicine: Reflections from a Graduating Medical School Senior, Dr. Wilson wrote a pre-match ode to the specialty. With lines like “Family medicine is not something I selected once and took for granted,” and “I chose family medicine in the same manner as I choose friends, ” it’s a gem to read when you’re tired of hearing others question your chosen specialty. Finally, there are last year’s Match Day posts: Doctor Tollivers’ Match Day Spotlight 2015: Family Medicine with Urban Health Emphasis and Dr. Palma’s 2015 Match Day Spotlight: Family Medicine
We round up the good stuff – hope you enjoyed it! See you next month.
