Doctor - Medical Training and Professional Socialization

Socialization:

  • when someone becomes a member of a group or society and acquires values, traits, behaviors, and sene of social identity

Medical Education:

  • socialization process where people are taught how to think, feel, and act as a doctor

Internalization:

  • Process of acceptance of a set of norms established by people/groups which are influential to the individual

  1. learning the norms

  2. understanding why they are of value or why they make sense 

  3. acceptance

Medical School → Socializes Physicians → Manifest Function:  technical skills

                                                                 → Latent Function:  hidden curriculum

KEY NORMS 

  1. Emotional Detachment

—  helps with emotions working with patients who may be ill or die

—  overcome of cultural taboos like touching somebody

—  learned through informal means like being made fun of for being too attached

  1. Coping with Uncertainty

—  all medical students feel uncertain about their abilities between preclinical knowledge and real patients and real medicine

—  uncertainty in medicine

— learn to cover up the uncertainty 

  1. Biomedical Orientation

—  learn to distrust the body’s natural healing 

—  acquire a mechanistic approach