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Medical Students Don’t Understand Aging, Elderly

Reuters Health reports that a study presented at the American Geriatrics Society’s annual meeting on May 10, 2002 found that medical students not only had a startlingly low level of knowledge about the elderly but the aging process in general.

79% of first-year and 30% of third-year medical students at Johns Hopkins University were surveyed.

When questioned on general facts on aging, more than half the students only scored 0-3 on a 10 point scale. The amount of education didn’t seem to make any difference; the third-year students scored about the same as the first-year students.

Some of the misconceptions the students held?
· Most older persons are depressed.
· The majority of old people live in nursing homes or with some kind of assisted care.
· It’s a waste of time to counsel an elderly patient to quit smoking.

In one hypothetical situation, 83% of the students said they would aggressively treat a 10 year-old girl with double pneumonia. Only 56% would recommend the same care if the patient was an 85 year-old woman.

According to the researchers, "These data suggest that medical students have negative attitudes towards and limited knowledge about older persons at the start of their medical school experience."

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