Volume 71 Number 2 March 2004	back to contents

From the Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY.

Address correspondence to Dr. J.H. Baron, Division of Gastroenterology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One East 100th Street, New York, NY 10029-6574.

Presented at the Oxford-Mount Sinai Consortium on Bioethics and Social Responsibility at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY on April 3, 2003.

Accepted for publication September 2003.

ABSTRACT

If I were Dean I would welcome new students by explaining that they will be trained to become humane, compassionate scientists, and that our medical sciences are based on classical Greek science and medicine, with its first aphorism “Life is short, but art and skill are long.” Science involves the conception and construction of refutable hypotheses, and their testing by repeatable experiments, followed by publication of the results. Thus, science is uncertain, tentative, probabilistic and universal. Our students will learn compassion both from our bioethicists and from faculty role models. I would warn the students that, unfortunately, much of the general public has little understanding of science, does not accept our medical model, and is increasingly seeking alternative, pre-scientific, non-scientific and even pseudo-scientific models of care, not necessarily from lack of intelligence, but perhaps more from scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. And the public fruitlessly demands safe and effective drugs, free from side effects, for all ailments, but they often fail to take drugs when prescribed, and/or take alternative medicines instead.

KEYWORDS

Medical students, science, pseudo-science, compassion.

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