What is an area of health research that you think should no longer be pursued?

[mgb_phys]

A teacher friend said that, teaching got a lot harder once they stopped capital punishment in schools.

I think she meant corporal - but I can see the appeal of killing one of them at the start of term to encourage the others!

 

[Moonbear]

Here's how I would use the question- or rather, here's how I would use *answers* to the questions.

I often ask applicants ambiguous questions- here's a few:

"Tell me about the class you hated the most, and what you would do to prevent that from happening again"
"Tell me, from your own personal experience, about an ethical dilemma you faced and how it was resolved"
"Describe some of the most important problems facing medicine today, and discuss some potential solutions"

I hope you can see why your question is similar to the ones above.

When I ask these questions, I'm not trying to determine if the applicant hates math, is a liar, or supports mandatory insurance coverage. What I am trying to determine is if the applicant has given any thought as to why they are sitting in front of me, or if they are just going through life doing what other people (parents, friends, siblings) have told them to do. Also, since I conduct face-to-face interviews, I'm evaluating how they handle stress.

I despise questions like that on interviews, and it usually results in me staring at the interviewer wondering what they were smoking before I walked in. Seriously, I find no value in questions like that and think it's some myth conjured up by evil HR people that answers to questions like those reliably predict anything other than that someone has gotten tipped off to those bizarre questions before starting to interview, so had a canned response ready. They also presume one has had experience with some things that not everyone has really had to deal with. What ethical dilemma has someone entering college really been faced with that is significant enough to come to mind on an interview? Heh, I might have to answer, "Well, I'm presently being faced with the dilemma of being honest and telling you I can't think of a damned thing to answer your question with, or lying and making up some B.S. answer just to appease your B.S. question."

I'm curious, Andy, what class did you hate most and how would you avoid that happening again? Really, put yourself on the answer side of those questions and tell me if they are fair questions that make any sense? I'd struggle to think of a class I ever even hated, though might be able to pick one that I liked least, but considering that had a lot more to do with a nutty instructor in a mandatory freshman class where your section and instructor assignments were the luck of the draw, there was no way to actually avoid it.

I prefer asking questions that are actually going to tell me something about the candidate, not about how well they can make up B.S. answers to lame interview questions. I do pull things out of their essays and experience to ask about on interviews. For example, if someone wrote about wanting to do cancer research in grad school, I'd ask about their motivations for that, what area of cancer research, why they chose that particular field of all the others...if they've actually specified it as an area of interest, they should have thought about their reasons for it.

I think you lose good candidates by asking weird questions. All it does is test how nervous they are on an interview, and that's not necessarily a measure of how they will perform in an academic program. I think sometimes those questions even get candidates you absolutely don't want...the smarmy sorts who can play a good game and have no qualms about making up B.S. as they go along if it appeases someone who can get them something...in other words, it gets you the butt kissers rather than the genuine applicant who is nervous because they really care about getting into a particular program and are thrown off being asked about ethical dilemmas when they just want to talk about the area of research that just gets them all lit up inside. They'll get ethics training once admitted to the program.

rowkem, I know that I wouldn't look negatively on an applicant who answered as you're suggesting, that there isn't an area you think should no longer be pursued. The reason is that I think it takes guts to not just follow the crowd and make up a B.S. answer and to state that you disagree with the premise of the question that there exists such an area. It's not the easy way out, because you're still going to have to provide a solid essay and convincing argument for the answer you're giving.

 

[NoTime]

Um, that IS what they study. The vast majority of cancer research is in cell biology, not, as you mistakenly suggest, looking for scapegoats. While there's a public health/preventative medicine aspect to all medical research assessing what things increase the risk of getting cancer (or whatever other disease, or dying younger, etc), that's only a very small, minimally funded side of the story.

Well the NIBIB (what I might consider a useful approach to an actual cancer cure) budget is about $300 million while the NCI budget is almost $5 billion.

Scanning CRISP abstracts (admitably a subjective process)
The NCI budget seems to break down to
80% traditional slice and dice clinology.
10% Cell biology.
10% BS

Perhaps you have better data, but at this point I'll accept I'm wrong.
Errr, I think you are too.
Enjoy

 

[NoTime]

I despise questions like that on interviews,

I certainly agree with you here.

 

[Danger]

Yeah, I'm with you guys on that one. I can understand the reasoning behind the questions, but from a candidate's standpoint it just reeks of being a trap. That would blow the stress level way out of proportion to a normal pressure situation. There's a huge difference between deciding what is the proper thing to do in an emergency and trying to figure out what someone wants you to do in any situation.

 

[rowkem]

Would it be wise to say that, in health research, much is left unknown and often what we think we know, isn't even concrete? I'm just trying to get the point that we can never stop learning and expanding our knowledge, thus we should never stop researching since there is so much left to discover still.

 

[Sample1]

"Actually, it's not so much homeopathic vs. traditional medicine anymore. There are some very intense movements within the US and Europe to combine the two medical practices. Both in combination are proving to be very effective in many areas of medicine." Tsu​

Respectfully, the statement that "both in combination are proving to be very effective in many areas of medicine" is misleading, imo. There may indeed be "intense movements" to incorporate Integrative, Complimentary and Alternative, Naturopathic, Homeopathic, et. al., into one medicine but there are equally, and I would say, stronger movements to reject all non-scientific modalities from gaining ground in evidenced-based medicine.

In fact, the largest current movement, I daresay, is the current "One Medicine" approach recently adopted by the American Medical Association and the American Veterinary Medical Association (representing over 75,000 DVMs). With the AVMA in fact, having less tolerance for alternative, non scientific, therapies being incorporated into the language and scope of veterinary practice than the AMA.

I do not doubt that millions of people believe alternative medicine is better or equal to evidenced based medicine. And I do not doubt for a second that millions believe they feel better or were even "cured" with alternative medicine. Sometimes tender loving care and attention is all a patient needs. But is that the same as calling it medicine?

Any alternative medicine modality that does not subscribe to the the gold standard of medical science (random, double blind clinical trials) should illicit serious skepticism if not rejection, imoh.

So yes, I would advocate less funding to non-scientific based medical modalities such as homeopathy.

 

[Andy Resnick]

I despise questions like that on interviews, and it usually results in me staring at the interviewer wondering what they were smoking before I walked in. Seriously, I find no value in questions like that and think it's some myth conjured up by evil HR people that answers to questions like those reliably predict anything other than that someone has gotten tipped off to those bizarre questions before starting to interview, so had a canned response ready. They also presume one has had experience with some things that not everyone has really had to deal with. What ethical dilemma has someone entering college really been faced with that is significant enough to come to mind on an interview? Heh, I might have to answer, "Well, I'm presently being faced with the dilemma of being honest and telling you I can't think of a damned thing to answer your question with, or lying and making up some B.S. answer just to appease your B.S. question."

I'm curious, Andy, what class did you hate most and how would you avoid that happening again? Really, put yourself on the answer side of those questions and tell me if they are fair questions that make any sense? I'd struggle to think of a class I ever even hated, though might be able to pick one that I liked least, but considering that had a lot more to do with a nutty instructor in a mandatory freshman class where your section and instructor assignments were the luck of the draw, there was no way to actually avoid it.

I'm surprised at your reaction, honestly. In the interest of fairness, I'll give my answers:

The class I hated the most was Thermodynamics, because I felt that the instructor, who wrote the book we used, used class time to lecture about material that was not in his book. What I would do differently is actually knock on his door and talk to him about the difficulties I was having in class, rather than spending time being frustrated and not understanding the material.

An ethical dilemma I faced recently was during an electrophysiology experiment; I measured the transepithelial short-circuit current in the presence and absence of amiloride after subjecting the monolayer to orbital shaking. I performed the measurement 4 times; three times, amiloride completely abolished the current, while on the fourth, addition of amiloride actually *increased* the current. I wasn't sure how to report the outlier.

What was the other... oh yeah, problems in medicine:

I think one of the primary problems facing medicine is that the body of knowledge is increasing faster than the education system can keep up, leading to an increased length in training time. We expect physicians to be able to quickly diagnose a variety of illnesses and prescribe medication from an increasing number of options based on a 10 to 15 minute examination. As a result, I believe physicians are becoming increasingly dependent on pharmaceutical company literature and advertising, to the possible detriment of the patient. I would solve this by having the physicians spend additional time learing basic science, to understand the basis of many medications, and increase the amount of training spent interacting with patients.

I prefer asking questions that are actually going to tell me something about the candidate, not about how well they can make up B.S. answers to lame interview questions. I do pull things out of their essays and experience to ask about on interviews. For example, if someone wrote about wanting to do cancer research in grad school, I'd ask about their motivations for that, what area of cancer research, why they chose that particular field of all the others...if they've actually specified it as an area of interest, they should have thought about their reasons for it.

I think you lose good candidates by asking weird questions. All it does is test how nervous they are on an interview, and that's not necessarily a measure of how they will perform in an academic program. I think sometimes those questions even get candidates you absolutely don't want...the smarmy sorts who can play a good game and have no qualms about making up B.S. as they go along if it appeases someone who can get them something...in other words, it gets you the butt kissers rather than the genuine applicant who is nervous because they really care about getting into a particular program and are thrown off being asked about ethical dilemmas when they just want to talk about the area of research that just gets them all lit up inside. They'll get ethics training once admitted to the program.
<snip>

There's nothing wrong with putting a potential MD on the spot- what do you think happens on the job?

 

[mgb_phys]

There's nothing wrong with putting a potential MD on the spot- what do you think happens on the job?

What about the interviewer pretending to collapse and see what the candidate would do? Might be a fun approach!

 

[Andy Resnick]

Look, I'm being serious. I didn't even mention the *really* nasty questions, which come from the School's admissions department as 6 pages of "suggested questions":

"It is important for individuals to know their own biases. Describe one of your own that you have confronted in yourself"
"If you were named director of a Health Department with a limited budget, how would you assess the city's health needs and allocate your resources for the most beneficial results?"
"How do you handle criticism"
"If you failed your first anatomy exam, what would you do?"
"If a friend fails to live up to responsibilities on something that has been agreed upon by both of you, what do you do?"

And on and on...

We expect our PhD students to make presentations at scientific conferences where they will have to answer difficult questions *correctly* in front of a potentially unfriendly audience.

We expect our MD students to keep their wits about them when a patient is crashing in front of them. And to be able to calmly tell a distraught family what is going on, and to make difficult medical decisions

The reality is that we have more applicants than we can admit; we want to admit those that can handle stress and thrive under difficult situations, because that's the reality of practicing medicine and doing peer-reviewed science.

 

[daveb]

I would answer this essay question along the lines of "A Modest Proposal" and claim that all health research should stop.

 

[greghouse]

If you want to do something "revolutionary", you might as well go the otherway around! Claim that if it wasn't for pathetic ideas like ethics, we would already have cures for cancer. Tell them that ethics is the area not worthy of further study! :D

 

[Mk]

As a general rule for entry exam essays do NOT pick a well known topic.
Everybody + their dog is going to write about cancer - you had better be pretty spectacular to stand out, do you have anything new to say?

Pick something more obscure like eg. Alzheimers

What? Alzheimers is just as bad as ADHD, cancer, and everything you hear about on the news everyday. I don't know much about medicine, but why not write about the dangers of heavy politicization in medicine and pharmaceuticals? Obesity, tobacco, illicit drug research, for example. Rational vs. irrational drug design? SSRIs or statins? Going over the history of psychiatric medicine, almost nothing has been showed to work. Thorazine was a big deal when it came out, but asylums, Freudian psychotherapy, and today's corporate drug empire still don't fix much of anybody.

Make the examiners interested in/think about what you are writing rather than just comparing your essay with the 100 other identical ones.

You have to stand out from the crowd. You have to show them why they want you, why you're different, and why you are valuable.

 

[mgb_phys]

What? Alzheimers is just as bad as ADHD, cancer, and everything you hear about on the news everyday

Yes, that was rather my point. How many alzheimers screening programs are there, how many TV adverts, how many fund raising events, marathon runners, for alzheimers compared to brest cancer?
If you want an interesting topic - explore why this disparity exists.