Transforming your daily work into scholarship: Tips for a busy clinician-scholar

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Academic faculty are pulled in multiple directions during their daily work life. Clinical issues, teaching responsibilities, and administrative duties all take up large amounts of time. At the same time, most faculty have requirements for scholarly activities for promotions. This paper discusses ways that individuals can use much of the work that they do in all of the realms of their jobs and turn it into scholarly projects. By focusing the content of their work, planning ahead, and making everything count twice, faculty can be successful in developing scholarship using their daily work.

Barriers to effective teaching

Medical school faculty members are charged with the critical responsibility of preparing the future physician and medical scientist workforce. Recent reports suggest that medical school curricula have not kept pace with societal needs and that medical schools are graduating students who lack the knowledge and skills needed to practice effectively in the 21st century. The majority of faculty members want to be effective teachers and graduate well-prepared medical students, but multiple and complex factors-curricular, cultural, environmental, and financial-impede their efforts. Curricular impediments to effective teaching include unclear definitions of and disagreement on learning needs, misunderstood or unstated goals and objectives, and curriculum sequencing challenges. Student and faculty attitudes, too few faculty development opportunities, and the lack of an award system for teaching all are major culture-based barriers. Environmental barriers, such as time limitations, the setting, and the physical space in which medical education takes place, and financial barriers, such as limited education budgets, also pose serious challenges to even the most committed teachers. This article delineates the barriers to effective teaching as noted in the literature and recommends action items, some of which are incremental whereas others represent major change. Physicians-in-training, medical faculty, and society are depending on medical education leaders to address these barriers to effect the changes needed to enhance teaching and learning.

Specific allergens evoking immune reactions in the lung: relationship to asthma

Over the last 20 yrs our understanding of the relationship of allergens to asthma has changed completely. This is due to several interrelated developments: firstly, it is clear that bronchial hyperreactivity can be increased by allergen exposure and that it is at least in part reversible; secondly, it is now generally accepted that asthma involves inflammation of the bronchi in which eosinophils play an important role; thirdly, there are a large number of studies demonstrating an epidemiological relationship between immediate hypersensitivity to dust mites and asthma; finally, it has been shown that natural exposure to dust mite allergens is very different from bronchial provocation. Together these findings have lead to the view that indoor allergens can play a major role in causing bronchial inflammation with consequent bronchial reactivity and that this is usually not apparent to the patient. Recently three studies in the USA have established that immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies to common inhalants can also be important risk factors for acute asthma. In these studies both dust mites and pollens were significant, but cat and cockroach allergy were also important. The results imply that the management of all asthma requires evaluation of the role of immediate hypersensitivity and that treatment of inflammation in the lungs should include both anti-inflammatory drugs and allergen avoidance.