"Pimping": Not About Sex-- About Medical Education"

The objective of pimping is to teach, motivate, and involve the learner in clinical rounds while maintaining a dominant hierarchy and cultivating humility by ridding the learner of egotism."So what we must decide is whether this "pimping" is an effective and benign form of Socratic teaching or in most cases really a form of medical student "mistreatment"To learn more about "pimping" in medical education, read this outline of the practice in eTalk.The cartoon also brings up another issue as to whether "pimping" medical students, interns and medical residents not only may intimidate and emotionally "harm" them but could this behavior eventually harm the patient.  A second year medical student writing in the Pulse website describes not only her own "pimping" but also witnessing her teacher "pimping" a clinic patient. However, a surgical resident who read the Pulse story wrote me the following:I may be in the minority when I say, I'm "pro"-pimping/Socratic method. I didn't think it was a fair analogy for the student to compare herself to the patient--the patient is not a medical professional. Making decisions with incomplete information is part of all of our jobs.  I say this from the perspective of someone that still has to take written and oral boards as part of my board certification process.  Practicing for oral boards is serial escalation of difficult questions.Pimping exposes the things that "I don't know that I don't know".  It is normal ...
Source: Bioethics Discussion Blog - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: blogs