Help offset your medical school loans by stealing body parts!

This story first came out in 2003, so I suppose they’re just now getting a trial together. The two guys stealing body parts had between 80-100 clients, and they illegally sliced & diced around 800 cadavers. The UCLA-based pair made $1 million before being caught.

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“Pimping” is derogatory slang used in medical education to describe an ersatz version of the Socratic teaching method. Most of you pre-meds have experienced this from time to time, perhaps not to the same degree though.

What is it, really? There are varying definitions proffered, but I consider it to be any type of on-the-spot quizzing. Many times it’s in front of lots of people. This allows for maximum pressure, maximum embarrassment, and maximum dignity lost. Pimping can occur anywhere, and the subject can be anything. Sometimes the questions are unfairly difficult and often it’s done in a way to create anxiety. I’d say 90% of the time it’s somewhat related to pertinent medical subjects, but attendings can pull a lot of nasty crap from their asses.

I liken it to a pop-quiz oral exam in which you have no idea for sure what the subject will be. In other words, there’s no way to prepare: you just have to deal with it on the spot.

Medical students obviously have varying opinions on it. Myself, I hate it. Most med students generally tolerate it and try to learn from it. There are a select few gunner dickwads who just love it. These are the type that are most likely to pimp YOU as a student while they’re still students.

Hoover links to an article about the history of pimping. Goes back to Dr. Osler himself. Turns out the honorable “father of modern medicine” might have also been a bastard who loved to pimp his students.

Okay, so what’s the point here? I question this as a learning method, especially during medical school. Many people say it works, because if you look stupid or feel anxious, you’ll remember the answer…blah blah blah. Hmm, horseshit? Perhaps there’s no better alternative for overworked residents and attendings than to informally quiz you in hopes that you will glean a few tidbits of knowledge. But while I’m not necessarily a touchy-feely person, I don’t know if the proper learning environment is created when students are anxious all the time. It’s adversarial and it’s just plain annoying. Save the oral exams for the end of the damn rotation (or abolish them for all I care). Teach me. Give me pertinent, important information for each patient we cover (assuming I give a rat’s ass). Good grief.

Another thing that kinda ticks me off: sometimes I’ve heard fellow students say something like “Dr. Bob Pimpcrazy loves to teach.” Teach as in “help me learn”? Or teach as in “try to make me (intentionally or not) look like a dolt”? I’ve encountered both types of attendings who “love to teach.”

Now, some might say that you shouldn’t worry about it and it only affects you and your ego as much as you want it to. That’s probably a valid argument. However, I don’t really care. I honestly just think there are much better ways to create a more ideal learning environment and convey important information.

Many attendings probably do it because it was done to them. It’s kinda “just the way things are done” in medical training. Lots of bullshit there, similar to anti work hour restriction arguments. Misery loves company. And any crap about “it toughens you up” is nonsense as well. Getting raped with a medium-to-large stick every day for a few years would probably toughen you up. Doesn’t make it something that should be done.

In fairness to medical pimping, I think many professional schools (law school for one) utilize this method. So it’s not exactly unique to medical training, though we might have the worst variety of it.

If an attending must pimp, he should make it pertinent to the patient at hand and do it in a non-threatening way. Medical school is difficult enough, so why make it worse by being an asshole? If you’re a male and secretly worried about your dick size, or if you’re a female and you tend to go psycho when you PMS*, do us all a favor and see a psychiatrist.

Observe the golden rule, jerks.

*PMS = pimp medical students

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My med school has several ceremonies during the four years that we suffer. Whoops, I mean “attend.” Anyway, uh, they generally suck balls. They’re all mandatory because (a fact they constantly drill into our skulls, only meant to be used as psychological ammo against us) we’re professionals. Because of that, it’s important that we be forced to sit through long, boring ceremonies that are only worth whatever value we personally want to assign to them. Since we’re professionals, they won’t allow us to make decisions for ourselves on superficial things like ceremonies.

In undergrad I was an idiot because I actually attended a ceremony (graduation) that I didn’t have to. Although undergrad wasn’t anything like medical school, I still should have rolled out of bed, tuned it to CBS, and watched the Price Is Right. Instead, I had to sit through a motivational speaker and the volumes of other graduates, only to walk across the stage to shake a bunch of people’s sweaty hands that I didn’t care to shake.

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Though I have never met Hoover’s dickwad surgery attending, I’m sure most of us 3rd year and up medical students have met similarly evil carbon copies during our God-forsaken surgery rotations.

If I could contribute to his “Attending Letter” that followed him to all jobs, here’s what his eval might say:

Showed callous disregard and zero interest for the feelings, egos, and opinions of students and residents. His fund of knowledge was non-rudimentary, but any shred of human decency in all regards was rudimentary at best. Zero improvement over 12 weeks. His participation was usually God-like, insofar as he thought he was the Almighty Himself. His ego preceded him wherever he went. Furthermore, his communication with his chief resident was piss poor since he claimed that excused absences were unexcused. This clearly demonstrates lack of organizational skills. Overall, if I had as little humanity as he did, I would fail him. Because I can rise above the type of–to put it kindly–heartless dipshit that he is, he gets a D-. Remediation is indicated. It shall include canings, whippings, floggings, spankings, and hot-iron brandings with the phrase ‘LOOK AT ME, I’M A SURGERY BITCH‘ all over his body.

Perhaps there would be no power to enforce remediation, but one can certainly dream. Sigh.

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A bunch of pre-meds (787 to be exact) are rightfully pissed because the AAMC just boned a bunch of them on the MCAT last Saturday.

The boning was via a verbal reasoning passage wherein the topic was robotic fish and the questions were about birds! A total of 2,400 took the test, so that’s a third who were given the flawed passage.

Of course, Dr. Robert Jones of the AAMC feels the enormously large error was just a fluke.

Not good enough. The expectation is that students have to be among the very elite to be able to be given the “honor” of medical school admittance. You have to perform reasonably well on the MCAT to even have a chance of an interview, for crying out loud. So the AAMC can make grave lapses like this and it’s not a big deal? Dr. Jones himself admits everything is reviewed in detail by several different people (ostensibly competent ones). Huh? If this is even true, it’s unacceptable.

The solution put forth is to give a VR score that’s extrapolated based on the non-flawed passages. If the student doesn’t opt for that, option #2 is a refund. Obviously both of these are horrible solutions. Extrapolated scores could mean a much higher or lower result, and refunding money means these poor pre-meds have to prepare and TAKE IT AGAIN when it’s not their fault.

As is pointed out by FairTest, a watchdog group, there are also variables such as having an ungodly huge anxiety attack when seeing f’d up questions that have no bearing on the passage. Might just slightly ruin your optimal performance.

Fluke or systemic incompetence? Whatever the case, I say let all 787 matriculate at medical schools of their choices. Why not trade an incredible mistake for an incredible solution? Perhaps only just 10% would be as incompetent as the AAMC is in this case.

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