A study published this month's issue of Patient Education and Counseling found increased rates of nervousness among female medical students and corresponding decreased clinical performance. Summer Johnson comments on the study at bioethics.net. Does anyone think that women make inferior doctors? Of course not. But, apparently, they are not evaluated as highly as their male counterparts. This study confirms my long held belief that clinical evaluations of medical students are completely bogus. They are probably useful for identifying the very small subset of students who have serious problems interacting with patients in order to prevent them from graduating. But, for the most part, they are highly subjective and mostly meaningless. It took me until about the end of my third year to figure it out but, in medical school you are evaluated much more highly for being consistently and confidently wrong than you are for being tentative but on the right track. And, if someone pats you on the back enough times for guessing at a diagnosis and a reasonable plan, you eventually start to believe that that's what good medicine is.
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