Ancillary Meeting: Physics in Medicine – Advancing Medical Education, Diagnoses and Treatment

The Physics in Medicine (PIM) Program, supported by the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation, focuses on physics as the foundational science of all life sciences in enveloping trans-disciplinary and integrative approaches to clinical practice and to curricula across the continuum from pre-medical through continuing medical education. The program is in response to mandates for change that have come from numerous panels supported by the AAMC, HHMI, NIH, NCI, and the Carnegie Foundation. They have raised concerns about the basic science content in medical education and have advocated for major reform in the curricula and associated student competency requirements. They report that medical education has stagnated and has not kept pace with the basic sciences or the emerging and frontier technologies in the diagnosis and management of disease. In response, PIM is in the process of developing learning modules designed to equip future physicians with a strong scientific foundation upon which to initiate modern medical practice, fostering scholastic rigor, solid analytical and adaptive thinking, quantitative assessment, and clinical precision. Indeed, the onset of all diseases, their progression and their in vivo controls are traceable to the attributes of cell, tissue, and organ properties controlled by atomic and molecular physics and an arsenal of electrical, kinetic, thermodynamic, fluidic, and gradient-driven forces.

Topics covered by our Working Group Chairpersons and open for comments, questions, and participation include clinical and curricular perspectives on PIM advances within leading medical disciplines and prevailing issues involving medical-school and graduate-medical-education constraints, testing and licensing. The topics (with relevant reference materials available for review on poster boards in the special-session meeting room) include:

1. Medical School Needs and Constraints – Perspectives on PIM’s Near- and Longer-Term Curricular Deliverables and the Implementation Process, Clay Marsh, MD
2. Physics in the Pre-Clinical Medical School Curriculum: Foundational Science Content – From Mnemonics to Adaptive Thinking and a Deep Understanding of Cause-Effect Analyses to Support Advances in Medical Diagnosis, Leslie LaConte, PhD
3. The Integrated Cardiovascular-Pulmonary System; Chad Miller, MD, FACP, SFHM
4. Neuroscience, Electrodynamics and Cellular Biology: - The Mind and the Brain; Mike Friedlander, PhD and Peter Konrad, MD, PhD 
5. Cancer and Oncology – The Making of a Cancer Cell; John Deeken, MD and Emanuel Petricoin, PhD
6. Energetic Particles, Electromagnetic Radiation...and Ultrasound Effects on Human Cells and Tissue - Diagnostic and Treatment Devices- The Good, the Bad and the Evil; Wolfgang Losert, PhD and Andrew Olson, MD, FACP, FAAP