Learners in the Carver College of Medicine are invited to provide examples of effective teaching at the end of each rotation. Read what our trainees recently had to say about Internal Medicine educators below. The first two were submitted in June, at the end of the previous academic year. Read previous submissions.

Stephen Stone, MD, Third Year Resident, Internal Medicine
Submitted by Ryan Horne

Great afternoon teaching when on inpatient VA service.

Michihiko Goto, MD, MSCI, Associate Professor, Infectious Diseases
Submitted by Anonymous

Dr. Goto spent time every day with us and genuinely cared about our learning. He gave us chalk talks on topics we selected and included us in conversations on rounds. He also did a nice job of letting us fully present our patients before making comments or asking questions. He treated us all with respect and took time to talk to us.

Arya Zandvakili, MD, PhD, Third Year Resident, Internal Medicine
Submitted by Ryan Horne

Great example of teaching with patients and took great time to get us oriented and do afternoon teaching with us on in-patient service in 6RC. I’m very grateful.

Kevin Glenn, MD, MS, Clinical Professor, General Internal Medicine
Submitted by Helen Lozier

Dr. Glenn is an excellent preceptor of clinical medicine. He values students’ input and experiences and made the internal medicine rotation of medical school so enjoyable. He used every patient as an opportunity to learn and allowed students to find their own solutions while still guiding us.

Submitted by Caroline Brown

Dr. Glenn goes above and beyond to ensure that medical students are getting the most out of their time working with him. He takes the time to teach physical exam skills at the bedside, ask thought provoking questions about patient presentations, and the social and professional skills required to be a high quality physician.

Carly Kuehn, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicine
Submitted by Ryan Horne

Really went out of her way to give us thorough VA computer training and teaching on in-patient service. I’m very grateful.

Elias Hanna, MD, Clinical Associate Professor, Cardiovascular Medicine
Submitted by Carolina Chu

Dr. Hanna is an incredible teacher who takes extra time to answer questions and explain concepts. He is very thorough and is excellent at explaining difficult topics. I really appreciated how he welcomed all my questions and created a comfortable environment for me to learn.

1) Every learning topic including EKGs, conceptual ideas about heart failure, evaluating chest pain…
For each patient seen in clinic, he would have me look at the EKG and ask me what I saw, or ask me about why a patient was experiencing certain symptoms…. For each statement I said, he would ask me to explain my reasoning. Then, he would give me feedback on both my answer and my thought process. This was the best way for me to learn because I had to have support for everything I said, so there would be no opportunity for me to guess, which was awesome. Normally, one learns by making mistakes, but with Dr. Hanna I was always learning, whether I was right or wrong.

2) Clinical skills
I really appreciated how Dr. Hanna was a teacher both outside the patient room and inside. As a new rotation student, I was quite nervous about actually interacting with patients (listening to their heart, examining their legs…). He always introduced me to the patient, which made me feel much more comfortable in actually approaching the patient. During patient encounters, he would have me listen to heart sounds, look at JVD, point out murmurs or BP measurements… This was an incredible learning opportunity because it was one of the first times that I started to connect didactics with the actual clinic. Being involved with the patient during their appointments helped me not only reconcile pre-clinical studies with the clinical presentation, but also emphasized the individualization of medicine through unique clinical presentations of patients that had similar pathophysiology.

3) Connecting clinical presentation with pathophysiology
One of the best parts about rotating with Dr. Hanna was how he connected a clinical symptom to the underlying pathophysiology. For example, why older people normally have more white coat hypertension than younger people, or why someone may feel the need to cough during irregular heart rhythms… This was such a good way to actually remember conditions (vs just reading symptoms you would expect on uptodate). Doing this helped me better understand someone’s symptoms and recognize connections to a certain pathophysiology.

Ethan Kuperman, MD, SFHM, Clinical Associate Professor, General Internal Medicine
Submitted by Ryan Horne

Great example of using the Socratic Method to guide students and patients to arrive at the answers for themselves. Done with great respect and style!

Paul Lindower, MD, Clinical Professor of, Cardiovascular Medicine
Submitted by Carolina Chu

Learning from and working with Dr. Lindower was a privilege. He made me feel very comfortable in asking questions and he always had these very organized slides pulled up to explain concepts.

1) Echocardiograms
As a new rotation student, echocardiograms have been rather intimidating. Everyone talks about them so it was daunting to attempt to speak up about really not knowing how to discern the images at all. However, Dr. Lindower’s enthusiasm for echo was amazing and prompted me to ask him to teach me. Dr. Lindower pulled up one of his slides about echo and started from the conceptual basis. This was great because instead of just jumping into an actual echo and pointing out structures that I definitely could not pick out by myself (unhelpful), he helped me understand the type of medium that is ideal for echo, what parts of the body/windows are used and therefore how the heart is positioned on different views, why it is harder to obtain good images on certain populations, what the different colors on a doppler indicate… Then, we started to look at real echos together. I appreciated the diagrams that he drew to show how the heart was “cut” to obtain a certain view and demonstrations that he did to help me position myself in relation to the image I was seeing on the echo. I have since felt much more oriented when looking at TTE/TEEs and can actually start understanding/participating in conversations about the images during POCUS.

2) Pretest probability and testing
As an unexperienced student who hopes to not miss something, I have felt the need to throw all diagnostic tests and labs at someone when they exhibiting signs of possible illness. Dr. Lindower has taken the time to show, both through clinical case examples from our patients and through large scale studies, that results from different types of tests (stress test, troponin…) have different value depending on the symptoms/story of each patient. Going through the benefits and potential lack thereof associated with throwing certain tests at your patients has allowed me to better discern what tests would have maximal benefit for different people and scenarios. Moreover, this has also emphasized to me to not weigh each test result evenly without understanding each patient’s story.