Another View of the White Coat Ceremony

Beyond the White Coat Ceremony

Note from Anna B. Reisman, Co-Director, Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers' Workshop, Assistant Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine and VA Connecticut Health Care System: This issue inaugurates a new feature: selected writings from the Yale Internal Medicine Residency Program's Writers' Workshop. The annual workshop began in 2003. Abraham Verghes...

Humanism or professionalism? The White Coat Ceremony and medical education.

In this article, the author challenges the widely held assumption that humanism and professionalism are necessarily complementary themes in medical education. He argues that humanism and professionalism are two very different value systems with different rationales, different goals, and different agendas. Whereas humanism is a universal, egalitarian ideology, professionalism represents the paro...

The white coat ceremony: a contemporary medical ritual.

T he white coat ceremony is a common practice at many American and European medical schools. Current justification for the ceremony is mainly based on the good will felt by participants and an assumed connection between the ceremony and encouraging humanistic values in medicine. Recent critiques of the ceremony faults its use of oaths, premature alignment of students and faculty, and the select...

Living donor kidney donation: another form of white coat effect.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Living donor nephrectomy can be associated with increases in blood pressure several years following the procedure, but the best method to assess blood pressure during the living donor evaluation process is unclear. METHODS Living kidney donors underwent casual clinic and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) and measurement of central aortic pressures at baseline and 6 m...

A study on the definitions of religion from another view