How Medical Students Attending Italian Schools of Medicine Maybe Introduced Into the Debate of the Expert Community? An Educational Perspective

Although in Italy any School of Medicine is prompted to introduce students into the highly structured system of scheduled courses and train-ings with equipped tutorials (1), undergraduate medical students are quite never introduced into the scientific debate of the expert community, i.e. how to read and write a scientific paper (2), and therefore they are poorly educated to use the scientific literature for their job and progress training. Usually, only graduated students are invited to read specialistic literature, despite for some exception during the medical course, when skilled aged students , approaching to the degree, are recommended to read scientific reports for their thesis. However, these students are rarely trained to address a scientific manuscript, so often they are not used to manage a scientific paper for their specific purposes and to perform a useful synopsis of the main focuses or draw a bullet point of the major issues. A first concern is the full and thorough comprehension of what a scientific debate is and how to expand it. Controversy and discussion in medical sciences are fundamental attempts to enhance the impact of science on professionals and common people. " Criticism " in science fulfils its fundamental target when it enables peer discussion to expand the debate on the addressed issue and contributes to a renewal in the state of art of the topic. Experts are exposed in this controversy, as it is of public domain, but they arrange their debate within a defined ring, which is fundamentally represented by their publications. Yet, particularly in Italy, discussion may create a journalistic rather than a scientific debate (3,4). Actually, some physician or clinician prefers to address the debate out of the community arena, such as press, wide diffused media, or more often personal websites or disciplinary courts, rather than simply reply to raised comments within peer reviewed journals. In this respect, some professors are reluctant to address a reply to raised comments in the journal and prefer to solicit Editors to prevent publication or even to forward a complaint simply for having been discussed. Questions are formidable weapons to fight against a routinary and barren academic life and surely educated students should give their fundamental contribution. The research community is composed of manifold talents and is much more complex and dynamic than expected, as science changes very rapidly, collecting novelties that continuosly reap-praise its state of art and expertise. In this …