Reading Comprehension

PT114 · S3 · P4 · Q25 Medical Ethics Training

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One of the greatest challenges facing medical students today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is that of remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all this rigorous training.

Topic

How medical students can become more empathetic and better prepared for real ethical dilemmas through studying narrative literature as part of their ethics training.

Framework

Problem / Solution

Main Point

The author argues that while traditional ethics training in medical schools is too theoretical to foster empathy and real-world ethical reasoning, incorporating narrative literature can help students develop the flexible moral imagination they need to face modern ethical dilemmas as compassionate doctors. Most Valuable Sentence: (end of P1) and (end of final paragraph)

P1: The Problem—Empathy Lost in Medical Training

Medical students risk losing touch with patients' personal needs and the ethical side of being a doctor because their training is so focused on technical and scientific aspects. The author suggests that immersing students solely in science is not enough, and proposes that studying narrative literature could be one way to help students stay empathetic.

P2: Issues with Current Ethics Education

Currently, med schools teach ethics in a very philosophical, abstract way, which doesn't really help students deal with real-world situations where ethical dilemmas are messy and complicated. The author believes that ethics courses that use narrative literature, rather than just theory, are more helpful, because literature exposes readers to a diverse range of human experiences and perspectives.

P3: Why Narrative Literature Works

Reading stories helps students develop "flexible ethical thinking." By engaging with characters' moral dilemmas from various viewpoints, readers stretch their moral imagination and are forced to consider perspectives that differ from their own—super helpful skills for doctors facing real-life patient situations.

25.

The passage ascribes each of the following characteristics to the use of narrative literature in ethical education EXCEPT:

It tends to avoid the
Supported
This is found in the first 3 sentences of the final paragraph: The first sentence is saying, "Now don't you worry --- using narrative to teach ethics doesn't ask you to relinquish all moral principles, as is the case with situational ethics." The second is saying, "such an extremely relativistic stance (as in situational ethics) would be as bad as option 2." The third is saying, "fortunately, incorporating narrative lit into ethics need to lead to the former (to the extreme relativism that characterizes situational ethics)." So those three sentences together are saying that using narrative literature to study ethics would not give us the extreme relativism that typifies situational ethics.
17% picked this
It connects students to varied
Supported
This lines up nicely with the last sentence of the 2nd paragraph: Ethics courses drawing on narrative literature helps because such literature .. attaches its readers so forcefully to the concrete and varied world of human events.
2% picked this
It can help lead medical
Supported
The last two sentences of the first paragraph convey this: ... aspiring physicians need to develop new ways of ... interacting with patients. Training in ethics that takes narrative literature as its primary subject is one method of accomplishing this.
10% picked this
It requires students to examine
Supported
The last sentence of the 3rd paragraph supports this: Reading literature also demands that the reader ... depart from one's personal ethical stance and examine moral issues from new perspectives.
1% picked this
Correct
It can help insulate future
Why this is right
There's nothing in the passage that says that this training will "insulate future doctors from shock". We talk about ethical dilemmas in the first paragraph, but the message there is that future doctors will need to grapple with modern ethical dilemmas. Grappling with something is the opposite of being insulated from it. In the second paragraph, they again talk about ethical dilemmas, and again it's presented as a necessary evil of being a doctor: ... the multifarious ethical dilemmas they will face as physicians But again, it's not saying the literature-based ethics education will insulate doctors from the shock of the ethical dilemmas they will confront. The passage seems to suggest that narrative-based ethics training will help prepare future doctors for dealing with these ethical dilemmas, but the verb insulate means "you're not affected by". Insulation in your attic keeps the heat inside and means you're "insulated from feeling the cold outside". Politicians in gerrymandered districts (ones where only one political party has a chance of winning each election) are insulated from electoral consequences if they choose to go rogue from their party on a given issue. So it's too strong a word, given that we have no explicit support for it.
Skill tested: Locate Detail · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
69% picked this

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