Values and Ethics: A Collection of Curricular Reforms for a New Generation of Physicians

In recent years, medical educators have expressed concern that the reductionist-positivist mode of medical education fails to equip physicians with the skills and attitudes to meet the full range of patients' physical and emotional needs. Indeed, the authors suggest that neither patients nor physicians are satisfied. Among the factors responsible are a pervasive industrialization of clinical practice, a progressive segmentation of patient care, and a deepening shortage of both primary care and specialty physicians. But underlying these system issues is a lack of adequate schooling in the values, ethics, and culture of caring. Today's physicians must simultaneously be analytical, perceptive, and self-reflective. They must have the capacity to see their patients as individuals with differing psychological, social, and historical natures. And they must have insight into their own values and behaviors. All of this contributes to making a competent and humane physician. To aid medical students in achieving these characteristics, the authors contend that medical education must be radically restructured so that knowledge and skills are taught within the context of values and ethics. This commentary explores such reform through the lens of three articles published in the current issue of Academic Medicine, by Litzelman and Cottingham, Kanter and colleagues, and Dobie. These articles are the product of a national call that resulted in more than thirty abstracts, testimony to the fertile thinking already being applied to this problem. It is the authors' hope that this series of papers will stimulate still more thinking and lead to the curricular reform that future generations of physicians deserve.