Medical students can be a bit annoying (like any bunch of 18 yr olds) but they are virtually all bright, motivated, engaged, interested etc etc. A lot more fun to teach than most students, in my experience.

One of the other things that occasionally meeting ex-students n years on teaches you is that their 18 yr old self is not a terribly reliable indicator of what they will be like at 23, let alone 28. Same as for anyone, really. So it behoves us crusty middle-aged academics to cut them some slack.

Like I say, provided students are basically interested, the rest can be acquired/learnt/ taught. The thing that I do find depressing about a significant number of the students in some bioscience degree courses I teach is that they seem to lack basic curiosity about what they are supposed to be studying.

Wasn’t sure where to put that comment!

The authors do a nice job of exemplifying the difficulties for Drs of balancing accuracy and honesty with need to reassure, and the way that the people on both sides of the Dr-patient dialogue are influential in what gets conveyed / understood. I suspect they might have written this in part as a “discussion piece” for use in teaching.

One technique with the victims of bad journalism (apart from encouraging them to sue the journalist concerned) is to invite them to test their assumtions. I recall a patient who was convinced she had become allergic to various foods, including sugar. She agreed to swallow a naso-gastric tube and we spent a pleasant and instructive day monitoring her reaction to the alleged poisons injected blind and randomly down the tube. She eventually conceded that she was mistaken and – I hope – lived happily ever after.

There’s another organisation that helps advise people about the reality behind what they read in the papers, or TV or radio for that matter. I only know because I work for them (hides behind desk to avoid sudden barrage of flak) – NHS Direct.

I know we mainly get bad press in the media, and even then the nurses get all the attention, but health info staff like myself answer people’s weird, wonderful & sometimes mundane questions about health, including putting them straight about things like miracle cures peddled by the Daily Mail, drugs being banned or discontinued by the NHS, health scares like the MMR debate, Alder Hey & organ retention policies and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Now, technically, we’re only available to patients, not health professionals – although anecdotally, it seems an awful lot of GP’s etc. send patients to us for more information following diagnosis, or before making decisions about treatment.

Unfortunately, we’re a bit short of health info staff at the moment, so waiting times for the health info side of our service are longer than we’d like, unless its something urgent. But we’re an option for anyone that wants to call us.