Sunday, February 15, 2009

La formation médicale française est élitiste, violente et antiscientifique, ainsi que culpabilisante et humiliante pour les étudiants

Medical training in France is élitist and anti-scientific, writes Martin Winckler in Le Monde (quoting Marie Agostini's 10-part documentary, L'Ecole de médecine, among other sources), as well as violent, guilt-inducing, and humiliating for students. (Meanwhile Jean-Pierre Balligand and Martin Malvy mention the recent accidents that make Frenchmen believe that the health system is getting worse, while inducing the big institutions to put the blame on the presence of small hospitals…)

Those favoring a national health care system in America will be happy to learn that 1) professors in France teach lessons that are obsolete, that 2) they teach their students to scorn generalized medicine (in favor of specialization), that 3) rather than favoring potential "high-value healers", the system (which he says seems to date from the 19th century) rewards those who are most ready to submit to authority, and that 4) any criticism of the "hospital-university caste" is "condemned to silence — which (the absence of criticism) goes far, in turn, to explain why so many in America, élites and citizens, are enamored by Europe's "flawless" (or close to flawless) health care system, about which they have heard so few bugs.
Le recrutement des étudiants en médecine ne repose pas sur les aptitudes à soigner — qui peuvent être identifiées —, mais sur des critères de sélection datant du XIXe siècle. Par sa forme, son contenu et le traitement qu'il impose aux étudiant(e)s, le concours de première année est contraire à l'éthique et à la raison. Il élimine, de fait, des soignants potentiels de grande valeur et favorise les étudiants les plus susceptibles de se soumettre à l'autorité.
Wanting to put his theories into application, Martin Winckler, the author of La Maladie de Sachs, decided to open his own, private school of teaching, in order to circumvent the "institutions' archaic and reactionary framework". But that proved harder than (or as hard as) he imagined. He will start his school this month — in Montreal…

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