Medical Literacy Posted on September 21, 2006 Helena Kraemer (bio) describes why training medical students to critically read research is important.

The one thing that I feel very strongly about is we have to give better training to medical students. This has nothing to do with research. It has to do with their ability to critically read the medical literature. They've really got to know enough about basic, I'm going to call it statistics but it might just as easily be called medical literacy, to critically read the research literature, decide that this particular paper is giving them the information that may influence their medical decision making and another paper should be simply discounted.

And that's not happening now because most of our, at least our medical students at Stanford, are not getting any such training at all. Some of our residents don't have this kind of training and what it means is that when they get to the point of deciding on a research career, particularly in psychiatry, where they are competing with psychologists, the psychologists have the advantage because they have a year or two of biostatistical training before they ever get to the postdoc period.

The medical people have to catch it up. That makes it hard for them and I think in this funding climate, that is very discouraging because if you put in a proposal and it's been rejected three times, the motivation to keep going becomes considerably less. And we are hard up for very good medical researchers, MD kinds of researchers. So it becomes an important issue.

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