Patient narratives of hope in stem cell technologies: Trust in biomedicine and the body's natural ability to heal itself.

The scholarship on patient hope in biomedical technologies describes two narratives of hope: the biomedical and the individual. The biomedical narrative represents patients' beliefs that the institution of science will eventually produce treatment for their disease, whereas the individual narrative represents patients' beliefs that they can alter their prognosis through affective and behavioral modifications. The distinct analytical categories of "biomedical" and "individual," however, fail to account for the fact that patient hope has been found to be much more complex. Building upon extant literature, we contribute to the understanding of the complexity of patient hope in biomedical technologies by examining a case that highlights interdependencies between the biomedical and individual narratives: hope in stem cell technologies (SCTs). We draw upon interviews with patients with Parkinson's Disease, and find two narratives of hope: a biomedical narrative, as captured above, and an additional hybrid narrative, which we call a nature narrative. The nature narrative reflects patients' beliefs that scientists will eventually create SCTs that will allow their individual body to naturally heal itself, which combines a biomedical and an individual narrative.

Implementing a Social Determinants of Health Curriculum in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Qualitative Analysis of Faculty Experience.

PURPOSE: Following shifts that broadened the medical profession's conceptualization of the underlying drivers of health, medical schools are required to integrate curricula on health disparities and the social context of medicine into undergraduate medical education. Although previous research has focused on student experiences and outcomes in these curricula, less attention has been paid to the experiences of the physician-faculty involved. This study aimed to capture faculty insights to improve understanding of the challenges and opportunities of implementing this curricular reform. METHOD: In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 faculty members at one U.S. medical school in spring 2019 to capture their experiences designing and teaching a new curriculum related to the social determinants of health and health disparities. Study design, including interview guide development, was informed by the critical pedagogy perspective and social constructionist approaches to curriculum implementation. With the use of a constructivist grounded theory approach, interview transcripts were analyzed using open, thematic, and axial coding techniques. Primary themes were categorized as professional, organizational, interactional, or intrapersonal and organized into the final model. RESULTS: Participants processed their experiences at 4 concentric levels: professional, organizational, interactional, and intrapersonal. Faculty generally embraced the movement to incorporate more discussion of social context as a driver of health outcomes. However, they struggled with the shortcomings of their training and navigating structural constraints within their school when developing and delivering content. When confronted with these limitations, faculty experienced unexpected tension in the classroom setting that catalyzed self-reflection and reconstruction of their teaching approach. CONCLUSIONS: Findings highlight the challenges that faculty encounter when integrating social determinants of health and related curricula into undergraduate medical education. They also speak to the need for a broader conceptualization of relevant expertise and have implications for how medical schools select, train, and support medical educators in this work.

Disciplining empathy: Differences in empathy with U.S. medical students by college major.

Citing their students' low levels of empathy, medical educators have scrambled to implement curricula with the hopes of buffering against the corrosive effects of biomedical and clinical experiences in medical school. The assumption undergirding these studies by social scientists and medical educators alike is that immersion in biomedical education and clinical experience erodes students' empathic capacities, and that exposure to humanities and social sciences content will amend these losses. But we do not know if this assumption is correct. In this project, we empirically assess this assumption by utilizing a unique data set constructed from student applicant and survey data from the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). We test whether medical school students (N = 8255) from the United States (U.S.) with different academic backgrounds represented by their college major have different levels of empathy, net of demographic control variables. We report two findings. First, we find that students who majored in humanities or interpretive social sciences disciplines have higher empathy scores than their peers who majored in the positivistic social sciences and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. Second, we find that the relationship between empathy and time in medical school is more nuanced than we would expect from the existing literature.

The Resurgence of Medical Education in Sociology: A Return to Our Roots and an Agenda for the Future.

From 1940 to 1980, studies of medical education were foundational to sociology, but attention shifted away from medical training in the late 1980s. Recently, there has been a marked return to this once pivotal topic, reflecting new questions and stakes. This article traces this resurgence by reviewing recent substantive research trends and setting the agenda for future research. We summarize four current research foci that reflect and critically map onto earlier projects in this subfield while driving theoretical development elsewhere in the larger discipline: (1) professional socialization, (2) knowledge regimes, (3) stratification within the profession, and (4) sociology of the field of medical education. We then offer six potential future directions where more research is needed: (1) inequalities in medical education, (2) socialization across the life course and new institutional forms of gatekeeping, (3) provider well-being, (4) globalization, (5) medical education as knowledge-based work, and (6) effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Conscripted Curriculum and the Reproduction of Racial Inequalities in Contemporary U.S. Medical Education.

In their attempt to address racial disparities in the provision of healthcare, the U.S. medical profession has reproduced racial inequalities of their own. In this article, I draw upon interview data with medical educators and students to detail how medical educators routinely offload the instruction on the social underpinnings and consequences of race onto students, particularly students of color. I develop the concept of the conscripted curriculum to capture how students' social identities are utilized by educators in the professionalization process. While there are exceptions in curricular approaches, most educators create the conscripted curriculum by eliciting students to share their social experiences with race in the small group setting while only providing students with didactic material on biological understandings of race. As a result, students of color report experiencing more emotionally exhausting and unrewarded labor than their white peers, and educators further devalue the social implications of race for healthcare.