Simulation-based medical education is growing in use and popularity in various settings and specialties. A literature review yields scant information about the use of simulation-based medical education in neurology, however. The specialty of neurology presents an interesting challenge to the field of simulation-based medical education because of the inability of even the most advanced mannequins to mimic a focal neurologic deficit. The authors present simulator protocols for status epilepticus and acute stroke that use a high-fidelity mannequin despite its inability to mimic a focal neurologic deficit. These protocols are used in the training of third- and fourth-year medical students during their neurology clerkship at Penn State College of Medicine. The authors also provide a review of the pertinent literature.
T he National Institutes of Health roadmap for medical research places great emphasis on translational medicine. Nonetheless, it remains a difficult proposition for PhD scientists trained to study intracellular and molecular mechanisms to appreciate the bigger picture of how their work relates to human systems biology. This difficulty is compounded by the disparate educational curricula that separate graduate students from medical students, with graduate students rarely experiencing the clinical environment. In effort to expose our PhD graduate students to integrated aspects of human physiology and contextualize drug utilization, we report the use of human patient simulation in our pharmacology curriculum.The term "translational medicine" is often used to describe the unidirectional transition of in vitro and experimental animal research results into human applications, resulting in new drugs, devices, or novel diagnostic tools. However, translational medicine works best as a two-way street, where the incentive to "cure" is driven by a desire to improve management of human health by understanding diseases and their complexities (1). Thus, one important aspect of translational medicine is going from the bedside back into the laboratory following observations made in human disease management. For success in translational medicine, an investigator must understand not only cellular and molecular mechanisms at the laboratory level, but must also have a thorough knowledge of human biology and pathophysiology. As suggested elsewhere (2), it may be easier to bridge the bench-to-bedside gap by teaching the laboratory-trained PhD about human pathobiology than by moving a chief resident from the clinic into a laboratory.Pharmacology has long been viewed as the most likely of the basic science disciplines to bridge the translational medicine gap. Not only does the discipline of pharmacology overlap with the basic sciences of physiology, biochemistry, immunology, cell biology, and molecular biology, but it also interfaces with the clinical sciences of neurology, psychology, microbiology and clinical medicine (3). For decades, PhD students in pharmacology learned about the discipline from a clinical perspective, with an emphasis on human biology and pathophysiology, while learning about disease alongside of medical students. However, with the recent reorganization of medical school curricula into problem-based, organ-system components, PhD students have increasingly become excluded from course participation (3). Indeed, there is a pervading belief among many faculty that graduate students should not be taught with medical students, but should receive dedicated problem-solving, literature-based instruction.A recent survey of current pharmacology PhD programs revealed that approximately two-thirds of respondents are teaching pharmacology courses that are specially designed for graduate students, but which, unfortunately, often lack the focus on human biology and pathophysiology that is characteristic of didactic medical school c...
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