Science as superstition: selecting medical students

1. I know the author of this paper as Professor Barr!  Waaay cool.  I’m going to shoot him an email right after this post.
2. Oh how true this article seems.
3. I love reading this after my first week at Mills!

Some quotations I appreciate:

It found consistent evidence that performance in the premedical sciences is inversely associated with many of the personal, non-cognitive qualities so central to the art of medicine.

A number of others have found the psychological profile of students who perform best in the premedical sciences to be the reverse of what one might hope for in a physician. Writing in the 1970s, Witkin found students who were most successful in the sciences, “have an impersonal orientation: they are not very interested in others”.

With an intellectual diet abundant in chemistry, biology, and physics but lacking essential psychological nutrients, we may have weakened the ability of many physicians to practise the art of medicine.

Great physicians base their professional practice on a threshold of scientific knowledge they have acquired throughout their career. Upon this foundation they build an artistic display of communication, compassion, empathy, and judgment. In selecting students for the study of medicine, we must be careful to avoid superstition, and to adhere to the evidence that equates as metrics of quality a preparation in fundamental scientific principles and the non-cognitive characteristics that are conducive to professional greatness. [emphasis mine]