MD/PhD Clinical Refresher
This eight-week course is designed to facilitate the transition from your PhD training years to your clinical medicine years. The course incorporates practical and didactic sessions to help you regain familiarity with history taking, physical examination skills, written and oral presentations, and clinical reasoning. You will receive a full day orientation re-introducing the fundamentals of history taking and physical examination skills. The course is split up into four sections: Clinical Basics Orientation, Module 1: Supervised patient care, Inpatient shadowing, and Module 2: Individual patient care. From these four sections there will be six weeks of direct patient encounters, during which students will practice their oral and written presentations and participate in didactic case discussions led by field experts. The course incorporates board-style questions into each weekly topic, thereby introducing the concept of multiple-choice format clinical reasoning. By the end of the course, you will be able to conduct history and physical examinations, present in both written and oral forms, interpret and assimilate clinical data to create differential diagnoses, and review pathophysiology of common disease processes.
Course Directors: Jenny J. Lin, MD, MPH, and Talia H. Swartz, MD, PhD