By Jordan G Roberts, PA-C
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that getting a medical education is akin to sipping water from a fire hose on full blast. There is so much information to learn and so little time in which to learn it all. This affects each of us at all levels of training, from the student to clinician to academician.
If you’re a student, you may relate to the feeling of just trying to keep your head above water. It’s all too easy to drown in information or fall behind if you miss an important lecture or even a single day of studying. It’s even harder at this level because every concept, disease, medication name is completely new and foreign to you.
As practicing clinicians, we need to ensure we are obtaining a certain amount of ongoing, accredited continuing medical education every year. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of doing things they’ve always been done when you don’t keep up as much as you’d like.
And of course, as an educator, it’s almost inevitable that some of the time you’ll struggle to find ways to help certain students academically. How does one teach another to efficiently retain and understand the important concepts crucial to patient care itself?
There is good news. Medical education does not have to be so hard. Researchers and everyday people have been developing and refining a technique that can take anyone’s memory to almost superhuman levels.
And it’s not hype. Peer-reviewed studies have shown this technique to be incredibly successful as well as easy to learn and implement. One trial showed that medical students retained more information in a shorter time period and improved their test scores by a significant margin.
It’s so successful in fact, that there are entire groups of ‘memory athletes’ who compete across the globe to determine who has the strongest hippocampus in the world.
Jordan G Roberts, PA-C helps medical education companies create and distribute the best medical education around. He helps students and clinicians improve their clinical game by using his background in neuroscience to teach simple ways to learn complex medical topics. He is a published researcher, national speaker, and medical writer. He can be found at Modern MedEd where he promotes clinical updates, medical writing, and medical education.
Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.