In medicine today, the superstars are widely known. They are the researchers who have garnered major prizes, great clinicians whose names have become household words, and personalities who grace nationally syndicated television programs such as The Doctors and Dr. Oz . But there is another group of physicians who tend to be unseen by most people, yet who play an absolutely crucial role in medicine’s future.
We are referring to medical educators, the faculty members of the nation’s 141 medical schools who are teaching the next generation of physicians. There are 75,000 medical students and another 110,000 resident physicians in the United States, and the quality of their education and training is highly dependent on the medical educators from whom they learn their craft. Numbering 128,000 in total, the work of such faculty members tends to be largely invisible.
There are good reasons that medical educators are largely unknown to all but the medical students and residents they teach. For one thing, medical schools tend to focus most of their attention on their principal revenue-generating activity, patient care. For another, they tend to appraise their progress and rank themselves based on the research grants they garner. By comparison, student tuition represents a relatively fixed source, constituting only about 5% of total revenue.
Yet these institutions are known as medical schools, and their defining responsibility is neither patient care nor research but education. Moreover, the work of medical educators is powerfully shaping the future of medicine for generations to come. If we teach medical students and residents well, we stand to reap substantial benefits. On the other hand, if we neglect the educational mission and the people who carry it out on a daily basis, we all stand to suffer.
We recently sat down with one of the legion of the nation’s medical school faculty members, who, although relatively unknown to all but learners, is breathing new life into medical education. He is not a radiologist. We focus on a nonradiologist not because radiology is devoid of such educators but because looking outside the bounds of one’s field sometimes makes it possible to see essential features of educational exemplars even more clearly.
He is a pulmonology–critical care physician in his 30s. His name is Graham Carlos, and he is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has not earned advanced degrees in education or even done coursework in how to teach. He has not developed some new pedagogical theory or devised any new instructional methods. He has not won shelves of teaching awards. Yet his excellence as a teacher is making a difference everyday in the lives of learners.
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