The Academic Medicine and Leadership Track for Medical Students.

Physicians are expected to be educators and leaders, but few medical schools offer dedicated coursework or training to prepare medical students to meet those expectations. Since 2018, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine has offered a longitudinal Academic Medicine and Leadership (AML) Track in which medical students acquire knowledge and develop skills for academic medicine and leadership that will enhance their ability to become effective educators and leaders in their clinics, hospitals, professional associations, communities, and affiliated medical schools. This paper describes the novel AML Track, its learning activities, and some of its emerging outcomes.

The Intraprofessional Continuum and Cleft.

The continuum cleft is a costly and precarious gap that divides professions on the health professions' continuum. It is an interprofessional phenomenon that is encouraged because health care professions protect their members in professional silos and isolate competing professions in professional cysts. This article uses case studies of the allopathic, osteopathic, naturopathic, and chiropractic professions to contemplate the existence, consequences, and possible mitigation of intraprofessional silos, cysts, and clefts.

The Continuum of Health Professions.

The large number of health care professions with overlapping scopes of practice is intimidating to students, confusing to patients, and frustrating to policymakers. As abundant and diverse as the hundreds of health care professions are, they possess sufficient numbers of common characteristics to warrant their placement on a common continuum of health professions that permits methodical comparisons. From 2009-2012, the author developed and delivered experimental courses at 2 community colleges for the purposes of creating and validating a novel method for comparing health care professions. This paper describes the bidirectional health professions continuum that emerged from these courses and its potential value in helping students select a health care career, motivating health care providers to seek interprofessional collaboration, assisting patients with the selection of health care providers, and helping policymakers to better understand the health care professions they regulate.

The Health Professions' Continuum Cleft.

The continuum of health professions is interrupted by a natural and unavoidable gap that separates conventional from complementary and alternative health care and that may aptly be called the continuum cleft. The cleft occurs as a consequence of the development of professional silos during the professionalization process and of the emergence of professional cysts related to the efforts of some professions to insulate their patients from the perceived risks imposed by other professions. The continuum cleft can cause costly and potentially hazardous compromises to the continuity of care for >73 million Americans annually. Interprofessional educational experiences derived from collaboration in the health sciences among Oregon's uniquely diverse educational institutions may provide some guidelines for mending the continuum cleft.