Poor old Dr. Krebs. His painstaking Nobel-winning work on cellular metabolism, called the Krebs cycle, has made him the symbol for what's ailing medical education.
"Why do I need to know this stuff?" medical students ask me.
"How many times have you used the Krebs Cycle lately?" senior doctors jokingly reminisce.
For decades, first-year medical students have had to cram the details of the Krebs cycle into their heads. Now the biomedical model of educating doctors, based largely on a century-old document called The Flexner Report, is coming under fire.
From one end, our long-standing medical education model is attacked as out of tune with the information age. By some estimates, our entire body of medical knowledge doubles every three or four years.
[For more of this story, written by John Henning Schumann, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...dnt-have-to-memorize]
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