Technological Revenge.

Online Simulated patient workshop.

As I replied to a reader earlier in the week, I was scheduled to be a simulated patient (SP) for my school’s 4th year med. students from Tuesday to today and that this would hold up my continuation of the previous topic.  Before I resume that topic, please permit me to post about the this year’s SP workshop while it is still fresh in my memory.

Prepanic, these were held face to face.  Actually, our Spring workshop in 2020 was as well, with many but not all wearing masks.  In did not.  All the workshops since have been over Zoom.  For the last I did this before this week’s, I had over 50 students.  Of them, only a handful took off their masks.  This year, so far 56 out of  58 med. students kept their masks on for the zoom SP sessions.   The last two have yet to arrive for their sessions.  Each student enters the room alone and practices the medical interview over zoom.  There is no one else in the room.  Yes, many use the same room, one after another but there is usually about ten minutes between them as each uses only 10 or so minutes of the 20 they are allowed.  There is no “sharing” of the same air for long periods of time.  4th year medical students are wearing masks while alone in a room for Zoom meetings.  Many repeatedly touched their masks during the 10-20 minutes I was online with them.   Touching a mask that has been worn for more than just a few minutes and then touching anything without washing the hands is no different than licking one’s fingers and touching things.  Yet, medical professionals the world over have apparently forgotten this.  And they then have the gall to lecture us on health.

The following is related to my continued post.  “Telemedicine” has been a topic of the last several years prior to the panic.  As with each and every new use of technology, it has been heralded as providing great benefit to society or humanity at large.  Some how, tech never seems to live up to the hype.  Here are a few examples of how tech worsened the students’ experience instead of augmenting it.

The very first student lost half of their allotted time due to errors in setting it up.  These errors were not the student”s but those of the staff of the school who were in charge of setting it up.  If this was an actual test, who would pay the price of those errors?  Not those who made them.   Either the student alone would be penalized by a lower grade or the student and the testers penalized by having to make time to redo the test.

One of the classrooms used over the three days had the camera for the students to look into at the student’s eye level but the monitor which displayed the patient was above head level.  They are tested on eye contact in additional to many other factors.  The two students who took the initiative to sit far enough back to easily see and be seen were too far away from the mic to be clearly heard, especially while wearing masks.   How should they be graded?

The monitor displays a mirror image of myself to the students.  This makes it impossible for me to judge if they are understanding which side the pain I was to be in was on.  They certainly know left from right in their native language but not all do in English.  I am also not sure if I am seeing a true or mirror image of the students, further complicating things.

Beyond the absurdity of wearing masks against a virus, these are med students who are doing so because their medical school is requiring them to do so.  What kind of medical care can I expect my children to get from doctors who graduated from such silliness?  Beyond that though, it is difficult enough to understand people speaking through masks without having them do so through the mic and speakers of computers, and to do so in a second language.   The possibility of fatal misunderstandings in real world applications of this is so high as to be certain.  People will die because of this.  Yet, we are “all ahead full” in our mad dash to implement this.