The role of three-dimensional information in health care and medical education: The implications for anatomy and dissection

The purposes of medical education can be summarized as learning how to take an effective history, perform a physical examination, and perform diagnost ic and therapeutic procedures with minimal risk and maximal benefit to pati ents. Because patients are three-dimensional (3-D) objects, health care and medical education involve learning and applying 3-D information. The found ation begins in anatomy where students form and confirm or reform their own 3-D ideas and images of the development and structure of the human body at all levels of organization. Students go on to understand the interdependen ce of structure and function in health and disease. The basic questions for those teaching anatomy are "How do we learn and use 3-D information?" and "How is it taught most effectively?" These are not easy questions for teach ers and are rarely asked by those who currently defend or reframe curricula . Unfortunately, there is little information on how we learn 3-D informatio n and no evidence-based literature on the relative long-term vocational eff ectiveness of methods for reaching it. It is clear that we learn in several distinct modalities and that our students represent a spectrum of learning styles. To support the 3-D learning essential to both medical education an d health care, anatomical societies need to provide answers to the followin g questions: Do the opportunities of dissection (visual, tactile, time, dis covery, group process, mentoring) contribute to short- and long-term learni ng of 3-D information? If so, how? Does dissection offer significant advant ages over other methods for learning, confirming, and using 3-D information in anatomy? Answers to these questions will provide a rational basis for d ecisions about curricular changes in anatomy courses (if, where, and when d issection should occur). This, in turn, will link these changes to society' s ultimate purposes for medical education and health care rather than to th e fiscal concerns of the businesses of health care and medical education, w hich is the current practice. Clin. Anat. 13:448-452, 2000. (C) 2000 Wiley- Liss. Inc.