Hearing more than a heartbeat
First-year medical students advised to focus on healing, not just curing, their patients
BY TRACIE WHITE
First-year medical students Katherine Bell, Miquell Miller and Duy Dao celebrate with their classmates at this year's stethoscope ceremony. Video length: 3 min
For Jeremy Harris, it's been a week full of firsts.
The first time slicing into the human body; the first time wearing a white lab coat; and the night of Aug. 28, at the traditional stethoscope ceremony for Stanford’s first-year medical students, the first time actually draping a stethoscope around his neck.
“I’ve never used a stethoscope before. Why would I have?” said Harris, 23, a Cambridge-trained chemical and biomolecular engineer turned medical student, as he watched his 85 classmates troop one-by-one across the stage at the university’s Schwab Center to accept their new stethoscopes. “And the first time holding a sharp blade to someone’s skin, well that’s hard to compare to anything.”
MORE ABOUT THE FIRST-YEAR MEDICAL STUDENTS
The annual medical school alumni-sponsored stethoscope ceremony, designed to symbolize the importance of the physical connection between doctor and patient, took place in front of a crowd of several hundred family, friends and faculty. It concluded a week of orientation activities for the new students, who were born in 18 different countries—stretching from Colombia to New Zealand, Ethiopia to Vietnam—to begin their medical studies.
Most students joined in a student-organized hiking trip to the Stanislaus National Forest on Aug. 19, leading up to orientation activities and then the beginning of classes on Aug. 27. Course work began with an introduction to molecular biology and gross anatomy, for many students their first-ever dissection of the human cadaver.
“I haven’t dissected anything since a frog in the seventh grade,” said Stephanie Smith, a Yale graduate seated with her parents at the stethoscope ceremony.
The evening’s events focused on the increasing role of technology in medicine sometimes at the expense of the doctor-patient relationship, a trend that concerns deans and faculty.
“Tonight is about your stethoscope,” said Charles Prober, MD, senior associate dean for medical education. “Tonight you take the pledge that you will not allow technology to come between you and your patient.”
In his opening remarks, Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the medical school, asked students to be agents of change in a country struggling to deal with the high costs of its health-care system. He also pointed to the importance of the stethoscope’s historical connection between doctor and patient.
“We no longer really need the stethoscope to diagnose heart disease,” said Pizzo. “But the stethoscope is a reminder that you can make diagnosis without advanced technology. Many are skeptical about this.”
During orientation activities earlier in the week, Harris said he was struck by a speech by professor Abraham Verghese, MD, senior associate chair for the theory and practice of medicine in the Department of Medicine, which reiterated the importance of the doctor-patient relationship in a world where medicine increasingly depends on technology for answers.
“He stressed the importance of recognizing the difference between training physicians who know how to heal as opposed to cure,” said Harris. A native of Connecticut, Harris decided to pursue a medical career halfway through his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University while working as a volunteer at the Baltimore Rescue Mission clinic for the homeless.
“There was a great physician there who donates his time who was a great mentor to me,” Harris said. “He really changed the way I saw my purpose in life.”
Students kept their new white lab coats draped across the backs of their dinner chairs until the end of the evening’s events when they each pulled them on to look more “doctorly,” as Prober described it, and walked up to accept their stethoscopes.
“It’s a wonderful gift to receive as we’re starting out,” said Julia Pederson, 24, one of the new students who immediately took her stethoscope out of its box to listen to the heart of her 10-year-old sister, Abbey, sitting next to her at the dinner table.
A Harvard biology major, Pederson has spent the past two years working at the UC-San Francisco Breast Care Center helping to facilitate decision-making between breast cancer patients and their physicians. That work set her on the course to becoming a doctor.
“A lot of times I was working with patients when they were first diagnosed with cancer. It’s a time when people are so vulnerable,” Pederson said. “Making them feel like they are getting the best care they can helps with that fear and vulnerability. Being that first line of support is an awesome thing.”
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