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True or false?

BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.f2491 (Published 29 April 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f2491
  1. Braden O’Neill, DPhil candidate, University of Oxford and medical student, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
  2. Helen Macdonald, senior editor, Student BMJ

Half of medical school teaching will soon be proved wrong

Half of what you are taught in medical school will be wrong in 10 years’ time. This provocative statement was uttered by a former dean of Harvard medical school, Sydney Burwell. And the trouble, he said, is none of your teachers know which half.

It’s quite a startling statistic. And it is certainly not one that medical school lecturers and consultants tend to dwell on as they teach. (See footnote under lecture notes; PS about half of the information you are mindlessly writing and rote learning will soon be wrong.) It’s annoying to spend time at medical school cramming in more and more information that might be incorrect, but perhaps we can salvage something important from this.

Armed with the healthy dose of scepticism that such a statistic might foster, perhaps today’s medical students might become tomorrow’s better doctors. Students and junior doctors must learn and become competent with medicine as it is taught today, but we must also keep space in our brains and time in our day to nurture our inner sceptic. Keeping this scepticism alive is an essential tenet of lifelong learning and ensures that, whichever direction a medical career takes, we are alert to the possibility of mistruths. By staying sceptical, we are always thinking about better ways to look after our patients.

Such questioning students were exactly whom we searched for among the delegates at the recent Evidence Live conference organised by BMJ and the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. To find them, we asked students and junior doctors: “What aspect of clinical practice do you think will be rejected in 10 years’ time and why? Is there any evidence available to support your claim?” The authors of the winning answers were given reduced …

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