Speaking of Medicine: The New Home for Student Perspectives at PLoS Medicine

In a Student Forum published by PLoS Medicine this week, medical student Keyan Salari argues that it is crucial that medical students be trained to use and interpret patients’ genetic information appropriately and responsibly. This is especially true, he argues, because personal genetic information is becoming an increasingly frequent component of the patient medical record.

Keyan expands on his article in our first ever student blog post. He blogs about the continually decreasing cost of high-throughput genotyping and DNA sequencing technologies and says that curricula need to be developed that will prepare medical students and current physicians by incorporating genetics into daily clinical practice.

With the posting of Keyan’s blog, we invite all medical students to send in their contributions to Speaking of Medicine, the new home for student perspectives at PLoS Medicine. We encourage students to share their experiences, views on critical health issues, hopes for the future of medicine, opinions on the medical education system and how it can be improved, as well as their thoughts on any other topic relevant to global health issues that they’d like to blog about.

To contribute to the blog, students should email pieces between 200-700 words in length to studentforum@plos.org. A PLoS Medicine editor will evaluate each submission, and if a piece is approved for posting, a member of the staff will post it on the student’s behalf. Students will be informed in advance of their piece being posted. We hope to make decisions and post quickly.