COLUMN: Cutting throats instead of healing them

From Alan Lowinger's, "the Rest of the Story," Fall '00 From Alan Lowinger's, "the Rest of the Story," Fall '00My eyes were weary and bloodshot. My late-night study session had been sponsored by Marlboro, Vivarin and Visine, creating a nauseating drug-induced stupor. As I fought the inevitability of sleep, my body began to resemble the bobbing head doll on my dashboard, and I struggled to pull in just one more minute of study time.From Alan Lowinger's, "the Rest of the Story," Fall '00My eyes were weary and bloodshot. My late-night study session had been sponsored by Marlboro, Vivarin and Visine, creating a nauseating drug-induced stupor. As I fought the inevitability of sleep, my body began to resemble the bobbing head doll on my dashboard, and I struggled to pull in just one more minute of study time. This was not the paradise I pictured growing up.From Alan Lowinger's, "the Rest of the Story," Fall '00My eyes were weary and bloodshot. My late-night study session had been sponsored by Marlboro, Vivarin and Visine, creating a nauseating drug-induced stupor. As I fought the inevitability of sleep, my body began to resemble the bobbing head doll on my dashboard, and I struggled to pull in just one more minute of study time. This was not the paradise I pictured growing up. As a child, less jaded and more awake than now, I dreamed of becoming a doctor. All I ever wanted was a career that would be personally and socially rewarding. Giving one's life in the name of medicine and all it can do for society seemed valiant indeed.From Alan Lowinger's, "the Rest of the Story," Fall '00My eyes were weary and bloodshot. My late-night study session had been sponsored by Marlboro, Vivarin and Visine, creating a nauseating drug-induced stupor. As I fought the inevitability of sleep, my body began to resemble the bobbing head doll on my dashboard, and I struggled to pull in just one more minute of study time. This was not the paradise I pictured growing up. As a child, less jaded and more awake than now, I dreamed of becoming a doctor. All I ever wanted was a career that would be personally and socially rewarding. Giving one's life in the name of medicine and all it can do for society seemed valiant indeed. After my freshman year, I volunteered at the local ER back home. Later, I volunteered at HUP and VHUP. Acclimating myself to the life commitment that lay before me, I spent hours cleaning, scraping, wiping, testing and bandaging -- and loved it all. There are some major flaws in pre-medical education here and nationwide. For the most part, grades are based on a bell-curve system that weeds out students with progressively harder and harder courses. If you don't have the time to spend all of your waking hours learning the text by rote, it's very hard to get a good grade in any pre-med class. With a large number of students fighting for the few allotted As and Bs, competition is fierce. Students are pitted against one another in a world where half a point can make or break a grade. A pressure-cooker atmosphere like this one ends up creating a monster -- the hardcore pre-med. You know who I'm talking about. These are the people who will kill to be on top of the curve, and cry when they just barely beat the mean. These are the ones who will ask you for an important answer before the test, but somehow "don't know the answer" when it is your turn to ask them. Yes, it's those hardcore pre-meds -- killing the curve at a school near you. One may argue that with so many people who initially want to become doctors, there has to be a way to weed out the best from the rest. Those who truly want to be doctors will make the huge sacrifices of extracurricular time and social activity for their studies. I argue that the pre-med system at Penn and nationwide does weed people out, but not necessarily the right ones. Many that make it are well-suited for a future in medicine. A large number, however, base their lives on beating the person next to them. While such a system may work well in Wharton -- where competition reflects the dog-eat-dog business world -- to think that the future doctors of America also go through this "training" is indeed a scary thought. The idea of an exchange of information is completely absent from pre-med classes. It's not really an education when every man is out for himself alone and memorizing random facts. The need for common courses by which to judge students is obvious. The choice of courses does smack of the arbitrary, though -- perhaps not completely, but knowing the primary chemical structure of sucrose or the relative acceleration of a dog in a moving cage on a truck travelling against a brisk wind, well, that's pointless. Unless you work for Domino Sugar or Ryder, that is. Courses that involve some sort of science do not teach future doctors how to become better doctors. It also discourages people from also receiving a liberal arts education. Pre-med students have to fare well in their grades first, and extracurricular activities second. To be a successful pre-med and have any job or leadership position on campus is nearly impossible. And the professors -- like the one I had that gave out no As, and A-s to only 7 percent of the class -- well, they are not helping either. Being a doctor is taxing and involves intelligence, precision and extreme dedication. I certainly don't want Patch Adams performing brain surgery on me -- or anyone, for that matter. Still, the important aspects of a pre-med education -- anatomy and biology, for instance -- are taught again in medical school. Most of it, if you consult your local doctor, gets pushed aside and forgotten. Pressure is good, pre-med pressure is too much. The importance of the well-rounded individual has to be further emphasized before more are lost in college and in the first round of applications to medical school. Too many hairs are turning grey before their time. In a better world, this kind of stress would be saved for brain surgery and for the short game on the green.