In Medical School Shift, Meeting Patients on Day 1

But in the last few years, medical schools including those at N.Y.U. and Harvard have been doing some soul-searching about whether this lock-step curriculum creates doctors who lack humanity, who see patients as diseases rather than as whole people and who have what the medical literature calls “ethical erosion” — a loss of idealism, empathy, morality.

By advancing some of the clinical component into the first two years, the new curriculum also gives students more time in their third and fourth years to study popular public health issues like nutrition and how diseases might affect people differently depending on race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

This is a silly question:

Dr. Craig T. Tenner, an internist, talked to students about the pros and cons of preventive medicine, asking them to imagine they were tied to railroad tracks. Should they be given a pair of binoculars? “Would you want to see the train coming or not?” he said. Would they want to see it when it was two miles away? One mile away?