| Popis: |
Although the practice of medicine is inextricable from the social world, few medical schools in North America currently offer coherent and comprehensive tracks in the basic social sciences of medicine and health. In an increasingly compressed and decentralized preclinical curriculum, attempts to train medical students in the basic social sciences undergirding effective medical care are scattered and largely incoherent. This chapter describes our experience building a social medicine curriculum from the margins at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Over the past five years, we have offered a six-week elective curriculum, “Introduction to Social Medicine”, which takes students out of the classroom to various neighborhoods in East Baltimore. The aim is for students to learn fundamental theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic insights from social sciences to extend their understanding of the day-to-day factors driving health, illness, relapse, and recovery in the complex social worlds of patients. We will focus on two of these initiatives—the walking classroom and the clinic and its communities—to illustrate how these tactics can be used by medical educators in a variety of different settings. |
