Education: Use it or lose it

I’ve seen several online pieces about the paucity of nutrition coursework in medical school. For example, this:

“Nearly every week, I recommend a change in diet as a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol -- the conditions that fill American clinics and account for more death than any other factors. Yet, nearly everything I know about how to prescribe diet appropriately, I learned after medical school, on my own time. My formal training gave me only a few scattered hours on the single most powerful lever I have for preventing and reversing chronic disease.”

Look, medical school is expensive and formal instructional hours are a zero-sum game. More formal instruction on nutrition means less instruction about something else. And most of that course content is forgotten shortly after the exam.

As a former med school professor, I know that our students got instruction on nutrition under the title of metabolic biochemistry, for example. Verifying exactly how much nutrition instruction is taking place is difficult. Then there’s the fact that passing the USMLE exams is required for licensure, and those exams have few if any nutrition-related questions.

Think back on your college education. How much of that course content have you used since you graduated? I took four quarters of calculus and never used it except to pass calculus exams. Ditto for the three quarters of physics, two quarters of history, eight quarters of English composition and literature and four quarters of religious studies. I experienced plenty of teaching in college, but most of what I used in my career as a scientist and professor I learned through independent reading.

The fact is that physicians mostly rely on things they learned in clinic during their clerkships, residencies and after, not what they heard in lecture halls. If they do recall lecture content, it’s because they re-learned it later. Adults learn best when the information they are given answers a question they have. The successful physician is constantly learning new things, not simply repeating the things they heard in lecture. Learning after medical school is a feature, not a bug. The best doctors are the intellectually restless ones who are asking themselves questions and looking for the answers.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/122446?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2026-08-02&mh=eb71348a5ff6ae370cc6759bc5dc3300&zdee=gAAAAABm4u1YoCP4y5SBTJUyUyqo9KxZhft26L1xeGdP0BzzQQN1Pb_ifR6vFqhFh-3U6Q_nU7DbA-EawzzXKxSRhMOwjrOGuOKbf7OE641eN0HfnK6eObE%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%20-%20Randomized%202026-08-02&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

 

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