title: If I were Dean: a challenge to new medical students.
abstract: If I were Dean I would welcome new students by explaining that they will be trained to become humane, compassionate scientists, and that our medical sciences are based on classical Greek science and medicine, with its first aphorism "Life is short, but art and skill are long." Science involves the conception and construction of refutable hypotheses, and their testing by repeatable experiments, followed by publication of the results. Thus, science is uncertain, tentative, probabilistic and universal. Our students will learn compassion both from our bioethicists and from faculty role models. I would warn the students that, unfortunately, much of the general public has little understanding of science, does not accept our medical model, and is increasingly seeking alternative, pre-scientific, non-scientific and even pseudo-scientific models of care, not necessarily from lack of intelligence, but perhaps more from scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. And the public fruitlessly demands safe and effective drugs, free from side effects, for all ailments, but they often fail to take drugs when prescribed, and/or take alternative medicines instead.
authors.affiliation: Henry D janowitz Division of Gastroenterology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One East 100th Street, New York, NY 10029-6574, USA.
authors.forename: Jeremy Hugh
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Baron
mesh_terms: D004645:Empathy; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D012577:Schools, Medical; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology*