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 | What is Mini-Med School |
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Mini-Med School
What is a Mini-Med School? |
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What is Mini-Med School?
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What Makes Mini-Med School a Mini-Med School? |
J. John Cohen: Father of Mini-Med School |
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Mini-Med Schools are public education programs now offered by more than 70 medical schools, universities, research institutions, and hospitals across the nation. There are even Mini-Med Schools in Ireland, Malta, and Canada! The program is typically a lecture series that meets once a week and provides "mini-med students" information on some of the same subjects studied by "real" medical students. Mini-Med School students do not need a science background to attend. Some mini-med schools augment the lectures with laboratory tours, hands-on demonstrations, videos, and more.
*Mini-Med School is not affiliated with or sponsored by MiniMed Inc.
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Sponsors of mini-med schools are often asked, "What's the difference between a mini-med school and a lecture series on diseases and health issues?" The criteria shared by most mini-med schools - including NIH's are:
- The curriculum includes basic science and/or broad biomedical subject areas, e.g., heart disease, not mitral valve prolapse
- Each lecture builds on the ones before
- People are expected to attend each week.
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A little over 10 years ago, the chancellor of the University of Colorado (CU) in Denver convened a meeting of distinguished professors to invite them to serve as a kind of informal advisory council. "By some accident, I wound up being invited," says J. John Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., a wiry, energetic man with an easy smile and a fondness for cartoon-character neckties. By then, Dr. Cohen, a lively, imaginative researcher and award-winning teacher, had been teaching immunology and medicine at CU for almost 20 years.
The chancellor's advisory council met periodically, and the early discussions were stimulating and wide-ranging, says Cohen. But one meeting stands out -- when the chancellor raised a concern about the relationship between the CU medical school and the surrounding community. He worried that the public didn't really understand or appreciate what the medical school was about. At the end of the discussion that followed, the chancellor asked Dr. Cohen to come up with a way to show people what the CU medical school does. With that charge and his own inspiration and wisdom, Dr. Cohen created and developed the concept of the mini-med school.
The first CU mini-med school was announced on a Monday, and by the end of the following day, 1200 people had called to register. Within a year of its first meeting, articles about the first mini-med school appeared in three national publications: the New York Times, Family Circle, and the Journal of NIH Research. The mini-med school idea started to take hold in medical schools across the country.
When asked to explain the popularity of mini-med schools, Dr. Cohen suggest that because of managed care and cost-cutting, most people don't have a chance to talk with their own doctors as much as they'd like. Many of his clinical friends see 30 patients a day, he says, which means they barely have time to say hello to their patients. It's no wonder, then, that people appreciate being able to spend hours and hours with doctors at a mini-med school.
Dr. Cohen's interest in science and medicine began early. "To the extent I grew up at all, its was in Montreal," says Dr. Cohen. He was always a science nut, he says, and started doing experiments in his parents' basement at about age six. "They wouldn't buy me a chemistry set, so I borrowed my sister's chemistry book and got chemicals from the household. I learned a new way to t make hydrogen gas, made some, and blew it all up."
At the age of 11, Dr. Cohen got a job at a hospital near his home, counting radioiodine for a physician-scientist, Dr. Martin Hoffman. He was a world-class teacher and Dr. Cohen's main role model. "At medical school, I forced them to let me do all my training with him," he says.
Dr. Cohen enjoys fencing and rowing, and he's "a fairly awful road-bike racers with a club of guys" in Denver. "The 70-to-80-year-olds let me tag along as long as I can keep up with them," he says. His literature passion is James Joyce -- he's belonged to Finnegan's Wake discussion group for years -- and he's "way info" chaos theory. The best thing in his life, he says, is his daughter Zoe, now a graduate student. "I love to travel, with Zoe if she can get away. My ambition is to get to Samarkand."
Meanwhile, Dr. Cohen pursues his research and teachers. "Once I got brave enough to actually look at people while I was teachers, I discovered the thrill that comes when you see the 'lights come on.' That's what has me addicted to teaching." As for learning how to teach, Dr. Cohen gives credit to Dr. RickiAnn Saylor, "a superb expert in education, " he says. "The learning process is so complicated, it makes immunology look easy," he goes on to say. "There is so much we don't know about how people learn! So for me, every class is an experiment, and I'm learning new things all the time."
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