Berlin – 1/5

This week we visited the Charité skill training center for their medical students. I was impressed by these methods of learning – I feel that it is very important for us as pre-medical and medical students to learn to teach each other and learn to work together. I was surprised that there are no real pre-requisites to medical school except earning your Arbitur, or high school diploma. Our tour guide was not afraid to say that some medical students have no idea what they are doing in terms of practical medical application, never mind the fact that some have little to no background in biology. This is starkly different from America, where medical students are admitted based heavily on their acquaintance with the field, in particular direct patient interaction. We also learned about some aspects of the German health care system, in particular that German medical students go to school on the government’s bill. In my opinion, such a system would not work in America as it stands, even though our current problems with educational debt are getting worse.  For one thing, such a process would increase our already enormous debt dramatically. In addition, our society is too focused on the correlation between cost and quality – we believe that the more expensive things are, the better they are, regardless of whether it is true or not. For this reason I could see everyone generalizing the situation and conclude that ‘medical schools and our doctors are mediocre’. In addition, medical school curricula would become more standardized, which would have an impact on and probably decrease the competition in the field, particularly between medical schools.

We ended our time in Berlin with a tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It was emotional for me to be physically in a place where so much death and disrespect occurred, and where so many stories originated. Being there helped me understand how the concentration camp functioned and, unfortunately, how people were actually treated and killed. We also saw the laboratory room where research and experiments were conducted on inmates, which of course raises the question of its morality and the ethicality of using such data today. There will always be two opinions. On the one hand, such data might play a role in saving someone’s life in the future if we use it freely. But how likely is that? The scientific precision of the experiments comes into question here, since most of the experiments were uncontrolled and poorly executed. On the other hand, such data is intrinsically part of a heinous crime against human kind. But is it really something to be suppressed out of our minds and forgotten? The overarching lesson learned by visiting such a place is not to forget, but to teach future generations about what occurred, so as to be an active citizen in the world and prevent it from ever happening again.