I recently found out that I was "inducted" into the Gold Humanism Honor Society.
thanks
But what exactly does this award accomplish? Supposedly awards for academic excellence, like phi beta kappa, AOA, are given to motivate students, and perhaps to give a feather in the hat for students who are exceptionally good at studying. Surely AOA helps with residency placement.
I would have to conclude that the goal of the humanism award is to help a subset of students with residency placement, so reward students who are seen as humanistic by their peers and faculty. You can see how this could be a popularity contest, I am most humanistic/kind with patients during one on one, not during rounds.
In essence the reward may be a popularity contest, especially if some people campaign for it (how humble). However, all doctors who are in contact with patients really need to be humanistic, and I would think that most med students are very humanistic, so this award must measure something else. If not, then are the majority of med students not humanistic?
Certainly, medicine is a dehumanizing process, for both students and patients, and the end product is much more callous than what entered (on average), so promoting humanistic ideals would seem to be important, but it rarely gets the attention it supposedly deserves:
Have you turned a blind eye when an attending harassed a fellow student?
Have you turned a blind eye when residents made mean remarks about patients?
These things aren't addressed, but rather a relative handful of students are put up on a pedestal. What do program directors think? They want humanistic residents, sure, but they really want competent residents who can handle huge patient loads in some specialties. How would a surgical residency PD think about a student who won a "humanism award"? Would they think that such an honored med student would expect that their work environment be "humanistic"? Beats me, but you can that this award could be used in different ways by different people. I would think that FP and Peds would prize humanism, but there are some pretty gruff FP's out there too. Personally, I wouldn't want such an award because nobody is perfect and you need to strive to be humanistic to be good at it.
In the end this reward may do more harm than good because it tells the majority of students that they weren't good enough to get the humanism award, and are in essence, somehow less humanistic than other students.
Even prestigious awards can be heavily affected by politics, . . .President Obama won a Noble Peace Prize basically because liberals in Sweden like his politics . . . he is also prosecuting two wars and has escalated the use predator drone attacks in Afghanistan. Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would ask each day how many Talibans they killed during the night. . . Don't get me wrong, I dig the President's politics and all, but I don't think he deserved this rather prestigious award for "Peace" as escalating a war is incompatible with the highest ideals associated with pacifism and human rights in my mind.
A lot of silly meaningless stuff happens in medical school, handing out "humanism awards" is one of them.
Also, I don't think students who didn't get the award are going to try to be more humanistic as the award is handed out once, and you are humanistic with patients to ease their pain and have a more productive relationship, . . . not to get something to put on your resume.
I knew one of the attendings who handed out this award, . . . not a nice person, what a joke! People in academic medicine are not necessarily the nicest or most humanistic people, in fact some like the power they can lord over students way too much, so I think it is silly that attendings have a say in this as it has more to do with how fast you can run to get the patient's vitals and the attending's coffee cup.
I propose renaming it the . . .
Gold Medical Student Sychophancy Award
There are a few well-known negative people that get it every year, which totally discredits the award for everyone else who got it, as well as in the eyes of the entire student body. But hey, that's what happens when people start competing over "humanism".
