Talking with future MD’s

From J D Faccinetti – Berkeley, CA – May 2015. Last week I met another group of great young people about to complete their first year of medical school. This is one of those events that I look forward to every year.

This is particularly important because as we move forward, we hope to expand this effort to other medical, nursing and dental schools all around the country and eventually the world.

We are convinced, and so are the professors at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program (JMP), that if you expose young medical students to real cases, like my acromegaly, and they can interact with real patients, they will never forget it. Accordingly, when they become physicians, chances are they will never miss the signs of the disease or not recognize a patient with the unmistakable characteristics of a person with acromegaly. The JMP innovative Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach – read about the JMP here – focuses on deliberate scenarios crafted from real cases to expose students to different conditions very early in their careers.

Like in year’s past, this was a wonderful group of students. They asked great pointed questions and seemed in wonder of my presentation, particularly as I explained how it was missed for years and what led to an eventual diagnosis. You can read more about my story here. They were also very interested in watching the video of the pituitary adenoma resection performed by Dr. Manish Aghi from UCSF.

This year I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to them about the launch of Pituitary World News and explained our plans to increase awareness of pituitary disease to reduce the numbers of miss diagnosed patients throughout the world. I invited them to comment on our approaches, get involved and participate in our efforts as they move through their medical education. I sincerely hope they take me up on it as I’m sure we can learn much from their perspective.

As for me, I look forward to next year’s presentation and all the work to do this year.

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