This can’t be good.
Of course I’m exaggerating a bit… but only a bit. Doctors are being trained using virtual rather than actual cadavers.
For generations, medical students were initiated to their training by a ritual as gory as it was awe-inducing: the cadaver dissection. Since at least the 14th century, physicians have honed their understanding of human anatomy by examining dead bodies. But amid the coronavirus pandemic, the cadaver dissection — like many hands-on aspects of the medical curriculum — turned virtual, using a three-dimensional simulation software.
New York Times
What makes this worse is that almost a third of medical schools are doing this.
nearly 30 percent of medical schools, including Mount Sinai, used online platforms to teach anatomy.
New York Times
What’s even worse than that is that both faculty and students know using technology in place of human cadavers is not beneficial.
Both faculty members and students realize that watching organs move on a laptop screen is not the same as removing them, one by one, from a human body. “A cadaver’s body parts wouldn’t look as smooth and perfect as they do on a screen,” Mr. Catlett said. “Let’s say the cadaver was an alcoholic, you might see liver cirrhosis with bumps and ridges covering the liver.”
New York Times
How many doctors are going to graduate medical school without ever seeing the inside of a real human body? Are the medical schools practicing educational malpractice? Should they provide extra liability coverage free of charge to all the students they graduate in this manner? Should these doctors have a little COVID-19 sticker on their diploma letting us all know they never went through this training?
What else in our world are we going to fuck up because of this stupid pandemic?
Image by Rafael Juárez from Pixabay