Conventional Training Program Research Articles

Dialectal Differences and Learning Disorders

Sufficient information has accumulated to indicate that there is frequently a positive relationship between functional mental retardation and linguistic conflicts where speakers use standard English and auditors use nonstandard English. In order to negate the effects of this relationship, phonological, grammatical, and lexical interferences must be reduced between subculturally different teachers or clinicians and children. Ear training methodologies are suggested that provide for auditory contrastive analysis or bidialectal teaching. The inappropriateness of conventional auditory discrimination testing and training programs is discussed.

Training psychiatrists from developing nations.

Foreign physicians face critical linguistic and cultural barriers to learning American psychiatry. Furthermore, conventional training programs effectively deprive many of them of freedom of choice by forging a professional identity incompatible with medical realities in their own countries. Moral dilemmas complicate the identity crisis. Adequate training for foreign medical school graduates, the author believes, requires working through these conflicts in addition to special emphasis on the social sciences and public health.

Financial Crisis in Medical Education Support

To the Editor:— As students in several Medical Scientist Training Programs, some of which are supported by the National Institutes of Health, our own support has been assured despite the current scientific fiscal crisis. Nonetheless, we are most concerned with the tightening financial noose that is undermining and threatening the scientific institutions that have provided this country with both major medical advances and highly skilled physicians. Our programs train us for both the MD and PhD degrees. It would be quite easy to ignore these current financial problems and choose the more lucrative role of a practicing physician. Our programs commit us to a longer training period and lesser future financial benefits than the conventional medical training program. We desire to be part of the medical science community that is responsible for training new physicians, caring for patients in municipal hospitals, and making new advances in medical science. The recent