Michaela Barry

As an internist, my main procedure is asking questions, so words are very important to me. Early in my medical training, I learned that all doctors are bilingual, speaking both their native tongue and the language of medicine, where terms like myocardial infarction and otolaryngologist become second nature. I learned to translate my thoughts back to the patient’s vernacular when we communicated.

This year's U.S. News & World Report medical school rankings arrived not with a bang, but a thud of discontent. The conspicuous absence of prior chart-toppers like Harvard and Stanford, coupled with the shift to a nebulous tier-based system, has left prospective students and the medical education community questioning the utility of the once-authoritative and perhaps most well-known medical school ranking system.

In American culture, pharmaceutical advertisements are commonplace on billboards, TV commercials, and social media, however, this is not the standard everywhere. In fact, only the U.S. and New Zealand allow direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The FDA has some oversight of these advertisements, but they are not perfectly enforced. There is no requirement for drug advertisements to be approved prior to being released to the general public.