Professionalism is au courant in medicine today, but the movement to teach and evaluate professionalism presents a conundrum to medical educators. Its intent is laudable: to produce humanistic and virtuous physicians who will be better able to cope with and overcome the dehumanizing features of the health care system in the United States. However, its impact on medical education is likely to be...

BACKGROUND Many medical institutions have moved forward with curricular objectives aimed at teaching professionalism, but the question remains: are we teaching the most appropriate content at the most opportune times to maximize sustained learning? The students' point of view of professionalism is helpful in addressing this question. AIM To describe the views of professionalism held by studen...

PURPOSE Doctors are asked to play the roles of both a healer and a professional. In dealing with this inherent demand, we should first ask ourselves if we are selecting students who show traits that would enable them to become a good doctor. The primary concern of this study was to identify the core elements of medical professionalism that will develop into professional competence that we shoul...

The values of American culture have changed and this has led since 1970 to a competition with traditional medical values. The social forces that have stirred a reconsideration of core medical values come from 1. economic, 2. institutional and 3. life style sources and is related to efforts by non-service providers to gain profits from medical services and the attempts by both governmental and n...

The issue of physician professionalism has grown in importance in recent years, in part because of perceptions that our rapidly changing health care system and the incentives associated with managed care threaten professionalism. Inherent conflicts between physician professionalism and the financial and non-financial incentives used by health care organizations in quality management may be unde...

The teaching and cultivation of professionalism have long been part of medical education and have had recent special emphasis because professionalism has been identified as a core competency by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The author focuses on two complementary teaching initiatives that contribute to the development of professionalism in the academic environment: a...

Since the 1950s, there has been rapid and extensive change in the way assessment is conducted in medical education. Several new methods of assessment have been developed and implemented over this time and they have focused on clinical skills (taking a history from a patient and performing a physical examination), communication skills, procedural skills, and professionalism. In this paper, we pr...