Painting faced an existential crisis with the invention of photography. The platonic ideal of making a picture that fully represented reality was made meaningless by the invention of photography. The goal of painting pivoted from realism to impressionism, surrealism and subsequent movements. Painting faced its crisis by changing the definition of what it strived for. And to be clear artists that spent their career mastering realism didn’t covert to the new movement. New artists came along to fill the niche that had growth and potential despite photography.
Medical education is facing a change in the way students digest information.
Go to a pre-clinical lecture at any medical school in the US and you can find yourself a seat. It doesn’t matter the size of the lecture hall or the size of the med school class, students don’t go to class. Lectures are videotaped and streamed. Students gravitate to the most efficient way for them to learn and surprise, it is not sitting in lectures watching slideshows. If the students likes slide shows they will watch it at double speed with the PowerPoint open in front of them, available for them to make notes. This is nothing like the lectures I attended in med school.
Slideshows are tired, shallow, and inefficient. Students are routing around them. Good for them. I love that students are finding ways to learn in ways most efficient to each individual’s mind.
ASN’s problem is that Kidney Week is slideshow-learning. Selling slideshow-learning to millenials who don’t go to slideshows even when they paid tens of thouands of dollars is going to be like selling sand in the Mojave.
ASN has to make like 19th-century painting and pivot to a different platonic ideal.
What do I mean?
I mean a Shark Tank with real money on the line
I mean TED-like talks
I mean an American Idol-like competition for the best educational lectures.
Have educators around the country compete to make the best lecture on the same subject. Have them compete with the finals at Kidney Week. Rotate the subject every year, but make it a fundamental lecture that everyone needs to give:
- Acid-base
- Hyponatremia
- CKD
- AKI
- Dialysis for the internist
Pathology lecture that uses microscopes rather than slides
Simulations
Biopsy training with cadavers
Ultrasound training with patients
A recreational run
With pre- and post- sodium levels and AKI biomarkers
Cooking classes
Panel discussions with patients
ASN is using a fifty year old model of what makes a medical meeting and if they don’t adapt there will be fewer and fewer, and older and older, people attending. The ER and critical care crew have layed the blue print with SMACC, nephrology should be the first specialty to follow it down the rabbit hole.
