The Impact of the Humanities in Medical Education (Mount Sinai)

Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week I started studying for the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1, colloquially called "Boards." This is a whopper of an exam that pretty much makes or breaks one's chances of getting into certain residencies. It is the cumulation of two years of basic science studies in biochemistry, cell biology, embryology, histology, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, pathology, immunology, microbiology, pharmacology, and behavioral sciences. Whew.

I have been nervous and anxious in anticipation of the boards. I did not intensely study science in undergrad, much as my peers did, so is that setting me up for failure? That led me down a rabbit hole of articles about the correlation between USMLE scores and... pretty much anything under the sun.

Mount Sinai, perhaps the leader in medical humanities, has a nice literature review about this very topic. I am most interested in the section about undergraduate humanities majors.

"We found that H&M students were more likely to have academic difficulties during the preclinical years, but by the third year, they were, as a group, indistinguishable academically from their classmates with traditional premedical backgrounds on the basis of clerkship performance... We found that H&M students were more likely to have academic difficulties during the preclinical years, but by the third year, they were, as a group, indistinguishable academically from their classmates with traditional premedical backgrounds on the basis of clerkship performance."

And then comes the part about USMLE scores:

"No difference was found in "the United States Medical Licenscing Examination (USMLE) examination... between the science and non-science majors."

The article goes on to discuss other good things about a humanities education, such as how it positively affects empathy brought to the patient-doctor relationship. That's all fine and dandy - I expected those conclusions - but for now I can breathe a sigh of relief about board exams! My background does not negatively correlate with these exam scores!

Gotta get cracking.