Silence is not golden...

An article in today's New York Times points out that, historically, doctors in training learn in an environment that doesn't always welcome their input. From the article:

Although some senior physicians welcomed feedback from their juniors, others disdained it, either overtly or through intimidation. And students were all too easily intimidated. In a 1993 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, a Harvard medical student reported that although her resident routinely made derisive remarks about her patients on rounds, the rest of the team laughed nervously rather than confront her.

Similarly, as Dr. Adam J. Wolfberg wrote in the same journal last month, for years medical students performed pelvic examinations on anesthetized women who had not given consent because senior obstetricians said it was the best way to learn internal anatomy. Although this practice made many students uncomfortable, most were afraid to speak up.

The good news is that things are changing in this regard. Click here to read this article.