Leveraging medical education to address stigma and discrimination

Dinah Applewhite, MD

Fellow in Addiction Medicine, MGH

PGY 4

02/04/2020

Here I am presenting on stigma!

As an Addiction Medicine Fellow, one way I can positively impact the care of patients with substance use disorders is to educate my colleagues, residents, and medical students about how to treat people who use drugs with the dignity and respect they deserve. I signed up for the COE CTS course to make sure I was leveraging all the best evidence in medical education to effectively teach crucial topics such as stigma, discrimination, and harm reduction. This was my first time taking a formal class on teaching and it felt in some ways like learning a new language! Constructivism, learning goal orientation, spacing, interpolated tests, metacognition…. There is a whole world of MedEd I had never been exposed to, and it all felt very exciting.  

I’ve included a picture that was taken of me while I was giving a 5-minute talk on stigma. All attendees were required to do this, and following the session we watched a video recording of ourselves.  A year ago you couldn’t have paid me to do this, but I am now willing to push myself out of my comfort zone to become a more effective educator. I know that this is one way to improve the care of some of vulnerable patients who have historically had challenging experiences within our healthcare system.