Medical education still has a beating heart

Perhaps Dr K Allen, from South Australia, put it best, albeit harshly, in a letter to The Australian. "Medical schools developing commonsense, compassion and critical analysis in their students will go further in answering today's needs of the medical profession than dinosaurs in ivory towers reciting the names of the ossicles of the middle ear," he wrote.

Of course, doctors must learn anatomy, and the fact is they do.

I may be wide of the mark; perhaps an entire group of final year medical students did actually mistake a heart for a liver. Should any reader be able to verify the story, I undertake to apologise and publish the details here in On Line Opinion.

Until then, I'll take it as a "they don't make 'em like they used to" lament from a mob of ageing academics and non-clinicians struggling to engage with a changing world.