Using Bedside Rounds to Change Culture.

Although not suitable for every patient encounter, rounding at the beside provides an opportunity to teach and augment the attitudes essential for optimal medical care. It also provides an opportunity to establish and grow the team's culture as well as the culture for each patient encounter. Finally, it provides the attending physician with an opportunity to assess learners' position on the supervision-to-autonomy spectrum, thereby ensuring appropriate supervision while enabling the autonomy necessary for optimal learner growth.

The elite code grey team: a new model for residency preparedness and training in advance of a disaster.

Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee failures decimated the New Orleans landscape, trapping physicians inside hospital facilities for up to 5 days. With over 2000 people trapped in the 3 primary teaching hospitals, there were only 3 fatalities. Yet despite the lack of adverse events, the experience revealed that graduate medical education is woefully underprepared to deal with disaster.

Effect of Opuntia ficus indica on symptoms of the alcohol hangover.

Background: The severity of the alcohol hangover may be related to inflammation induced by impurities in the alcohol beverage and byproducts of alcohol metabolism. An extract of the Opuntia ficus indica (OFI) plant diminishes the inflammatory response to stressful stimuli.

Methods: In this double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial, 64 healthy, young adult volunteers were randomly assigned to receive OFI (1600 IU) and identical placebo, given 5 hours before alcohol consumption.

A strategy to standardize the learning of core clerkship objectives.

Background: Consistent and effective implementation of clinical clerkship objectives remains elusive. Using the behavioral principles of self assessment, active learning and learner differences, we designed an objectives checklist to ensure that all students mastered a core body of internal medicine (IM) knowledge and to facilitate self-directed learning.

Methods: We developed a 54-item learning objectives checklist card in the IM clerkship.

Improving oral presentation skills with a clinical reasoning curriculum: a prospective controlled study.

Purpose: The oral case presentation is an essential part of clinical medicine, but teaching medical students to present clinical data remains difficult. Presentation skills depend on the ability to obtain, process, and organize patient data. Clinical reasoning is fundamental to the development of these skills.