KU Med Center to have Mini Medical School for people 'hungry for'

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Aug 25, 1999

The Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Without ever making an incision or drawing a vial of blood, the faculty of the University of Kansas Medical Center will teach people a working knowledge of the human body and its ailments.

Best of all, the eight-session course costs less than a night's stay in a hospital.

Called the Mini Medical School, the program is a form of continuing education that more medical schools are offering.

"People are hungry for this information," said Mary Beth Gentry, assistant dean of the KU School of Medicine. "A lot of people don't understand what academic medicine is all about. This way, we can put a human face on it."

Medical school officials say that wherever the mini courses are offered, they have been sellouts with people looking for quick lessons in the latest medical discoveries.

The courses also are a good method to build support for the medical center's research, said Jasjit Ahluwalia, a faculty member and Mini Medical School organizer.

"We have to have the public behind us (to foster research) because it's the public's money," Ahluwalia said.

For $75, Mini Medical School students will receive lectures and have their questions answered for eight weeks beginning Sept. 14.

"This is going to be the essence of medical school," Gentry said. "It is going to combine the science and the treatment of disease. It won't be dumbed down."

The University of Colorado pioneered mini medical schools in 1989 as a gesture of community outreach.

After a newspaper article publicized the program, 1,200 people called to enroll, said John Cohen, a professor of immunology who organized the course. He was expecting only about 20 people to express interest.

"We were swamped. We had to find a big hall," Cohen said. "It's remained one of the hotter tickets in town. We've never been able to get rid of our waiting list."

Colorado's success with the program encouraged more than 70 medical schools, health departments and other institutions to conduct mini medical schools. About 55 schools continue to offer them.

"I'm not going to rest until every medical school is doing one," said Bruce Fuchs, director of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Science Education and an advocate for the mini medical school movement.

Fuchs is writing a how-to manual for schools that wish to begin the mini medical school program. He began mini medical schools at the Medical College of Virginia and the National Institutes of Health.

"The idea we want to get across to people attending mini medical schools is that you're going to learn serious information, and you're going to have more fun than you imagine," Fuchs said. "We try to send people away with a sense of what's possible, what they can learn if they put their mind to it."