Medical education

To help us unpack some of these ideas, I'm joined by Dr. Leah Harper.

Leah is an internist and transplant respirologist and is also the Assistant Dean of Continuous Quality Improvement for the Undergrad Medical Education Program at the University of Calgary.

She's the author of a recent June 2025 article in Medical Education called, We Should Nudge Clinicians and Trainees to Participate in Health Professions Education Programs.

The article applies dual processing theory and the concept of nudging to better understand clinicians' behavior and using participation in programs like mentorship as a case study.

Importantly, it moves beyond diagnosing the problem to ask a more pressing and practical question.

Right.

And so I wonder, is that something in medical education and society broadly that we don't do enough of giving people frameworks for which to apply their cognitive processes?

So this is, well, A, A plus question.

This is actually very, very old debate.

And if you want to understand, I think, what it would take to build a robot doctor, you look at Waymo and it can give you a much more realistic timeframe of what we're talking about to do this, which I think is measured in decades.

Yeah.

So leading towards medical education, I know you have a big role in medical education.

So if you're redesigning medical school for 2035, what would we be doing differently?

I think that's a really fantastic overview of a topic that's difficult to sometimes wrap your head around.

I'm curious, just from a 30,000-foot view, how do you think generative AI is going to change medical education?

And I admit, I'm probably on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, Amir.

I'm probably as bullish on AI as you could get.

So generating music has been another fun use case that I've been using AIs for.

The one other use case I just wanted to particularly highlight was this idea about knowledge and you talk about how, you know, AI making knowledge or sort of telling you the standards of what physicians should know, working on it in the background.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that particular use case in medical education? Oh, wow.

So we

He's played an active role in shaping respiratory and sleep medicine nationally and internationally, including serving as president of the Irish Sleep Society, council member and now president of the Irish Thoracic Society, and Ireland's national delegate to the European Respiratory Society.

He's also contributed extensively to medical education, training and healthcare leadership through roles with the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Tally University Hospital and Piedmont Healthcare.

He's contributed widely to respiratory medicine through research, publications and international presentations.

Outside of medicine, Professor Maloney is a passionate tennis player and advocate for maintaining an active lifestyle.

But I do think it makes a difference.

We had a question in the live chat, and I want to pose it to you, Dr. Fitch, because you are involved in medical education with the Blackburn course at Harvard for doctors, but also I assume some medical education as well.

Are they teaching person-first language in medical school these days? Do you know the answer to that?

Yeah, they are actually.

And so one of the things that medical schools are taking more seriously, I think, is also the psychological implications of living with obesity through the internalization of weight bias.

And language is a reflection in many cases of internalization of bias.

And I will say, as someone who also participated in that course, it's been interesting to see that lived experience was being built into medical education.

In other words, they were bringing people in like me to talk to physicians about what our experiences were.

Eventually, the lawsuits were consolidated into one, according to doc- court documents.

George Daley, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and Bernard Chang, the Dean for the Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, told the sc- communi- school community on August seventeenth that Lodge's scheme was despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.

[paper rustling] Lodge was manager of the Harvard's Medical School morgue.

He worked there for nearly three decades, beginning in February 1995.

And Simon Flexner was, um, a, a deeply embedded with the Rockefeller Institute.

He was the head of the Rockefeller Institute's, uh, Medical Education Board.

Okay, and so, um, they were, um...

They had already written the groundwork for what Flexner would discover when he made his 16-month journey across the United States examining all of the various medical institutions in the United States.

It, it wasn't just that they s- hired him independently and said, "You know what, Abraham? We, we want you to, to travel around the US, and you just see what you see.

Take notes on what you see, and tell us what you think the state of medicine is in the United States here in 1909, 1910, 1911." Okay.

He was accompanied by a gentleman, Dr. Nathan Caldwell, who was the secretary of the AMA Council, uh, on Medical Education, and Caldwell was really the individual who was, um, the one who wrote the evaluations, and, and they already knew which schools they were gonna target for elimination.

So, um, you know, the, the Flexner Report in the end analysis was just a cudgel to wipe out all of these other competing schools, eclectic schools, homeopathic schools, chiropractic schools, um, naturopath schools that were, were, um, deemed to be illegitimate competitors to the allopathic model.