The Boston Herald reported today that an emergency medicine resident at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Long Island posted an inappropriate picture to her Facebook page.  The photo is of a fellow classmate smiling and giving two thumbs up over a cadaver.  The picture was taken while the two were medical students at Stony Brook taking a gross anatomy class.

Here’s the photo, with the face of the deceased person blurred out…

The resident who posted the photo, Dr. Erica Katz, has apologized profusely to the media and to her coworkers and former professors/mentors at Stony Brook.  The hospital has yet to say whether or not they will formally reprimand the physician.  The student who is posing for the picture has also made an apology for his actions.

Although most medical schools continue to offer cadaver labs for teaching anatomy, some are going to virtual labs as methods of teaching, as cadavers donated for medical teaching are becoming more scarce.  Many anatomy labs are also employing “pro-sections,” where the professor dissects one cadaver in front of the student audience.  The students then use the dissected specimen and computer models to study.  In light of the current scandal, it is easy to see that the standard methods of teaching anatomy are going to have to adapt.    News like this certainly doesn’t make the public want to go out and donate their bodies to science.

All medical schools have policies regarding the photography of cadavers and behavior in the cadaver lab.  It is treated as a very sensitive subject.  Some schools, like the University of North Carolina, even have student-run memorial services at the end of an anatomy course to honor those who have donated their remains to medical education.  Clearly these students were less sensitive.

This comes just days after inappropriate pictures were posted on Facebook of Puerto Rican doctors partying in the field clinics of Haiti.   I wish people would stop misbehaving for the sake of the profession.  And at the very least they should know by now what to post and what NOT to post on Facebook.

Here’s the full article courtesy of bostonherald.com.

Tags: doctors in the public eye, Facebook, medical education

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under In the News, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.