PG Times

A woman in her thirties from Tamil Nadu says she deferred marriage after completing her MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery), a 5.5-year programme, to pursue a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.), a postgraduate speciality degree. To enter a specialised stream, she had to clear the NEET PG (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test–Postgraduate), a mandatory national-level entrance examination for postgraduate medical courses. However, she was unable to clear the exam on her first attempt. During this period, as she waited another year to reattempt the examination, she was advised by her parents to get married, with the assurance that she could clear NEET PG the following year. Her parents expressed concern that, at nearly 25 years of age, delaying marriage further might make it difficult for her to find a suitable match. She got married. The following year, she cleared NEET PG and secured admission to a government medical college in Tamil Nadu for a three-year M.D. programme in general...

Not every training doctor requires homework or imposed deadlines to develop valuable skills: the real focus should be on teaching doctors on how to read and understand research, by providing hands-on research training without the pressure of mandatory submission Poor research training - a multi-faceted problem Most undergraduate students are not taught research. The requirement of a good foundation in statistics also makes learning research challenging and often less interesting, as the dislike for numbers is often what pushes people to pursue medicine. Knowledge of the human body—its physiology, the what, when and how of diseases, and the principles of diagnosis and treatment—is far more intriguing to students. For most medical students, their first exposure to research occurs during Community Medicine postings in their third year. As scientific critical thinking but rote learning is the requirement to clear all exams, undergraduate research is considered an ‘extracurricular activity’...