Eluding clinical medicine: a phenomenon that can be stopped

A study published in this issue (Lotan et at.) reveals distressing data on the percentage of 4th year students, after their first clerkship, that regret their choice of medicine as a career and contemplate a non-clinical vocational path. This phenomenon, entitled "eluding clinical medicine", is analyzed in terms of early professional socialization of the students toward sciences and their difficulty to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, so typical to clinical medicine. Also discussed is the student's incapability to integrate acquired knowledge across disciplines and to interweave it into clinical reality. Rectification of this escape from clinical medicine" may require modification of the pattern of the students' professional socialization during their first years of studies by such measures as early clinical exposure, interdisciplinary integration and practice in decision-making and problem-solving throughout the so-called "preclinical phase". The alarming findings presented in the above-mentioned study call for immediate response.