Dissection debate: Why are medical schools cutting back on cadavers?

For fledgling medical students, slicing into their first cadaver can be an important rite of passage.

They often enter the anatomy lab as skittish new trainees and leave it as self-assured future physicians, having spent weeks or months digging fingers-first into the secrets of the human body.

That, at least, is the view of Benjamin Rosser, the head of Saskatchewans only anatomy lab, a place that is now at the centre of a debate about whether all medical students not just future surgeons or specialists should still have to perform traditional dissections before they become MDs.

About half of Canadas medical schools have already traded complete dissections for a combination of pre-cut body parts and new imaging technologies that offer a faster route to teaching basic anatomy. Speed is of the essence because, as medical knowledge expands, some schools are finding it difficult to squeeze a complete dissection into undergraduates jam-packed schedules.

The University of Saskatchewans College of Medicine decided earlier this year to phase out full dissections from the core curriculum for undergraduates, a move the school made as it prepares to build a new $3.85-million human structures laboratory that is expected to open in 2016 or 2017. Dissections will still be offered as an elective or clerkship.

But proponents of mandatory dissections, including Dr. Rosser, the head of anatomy and cell biology at the U of S, say medical students will miss out on something fundamental if they are not required to wield their own scalpels on their own cadavers.

Its like the difference between watching somebody show you how to drive a car, he said, and actually driving it.

There is no accreditation requirement for active dissections at Canadian medical schools.

Research on the best way to teach anatomy is mixed, according to Nick Ovsenek, the associate dean of biomedical sciences and graduate studies at the medical college at the U of S, and author of the report that recommended doing away with mandatory dissections. If you look at the literature, its a polarized environment. The jury is out, he said. Dr. Rosser disagreed, saying full dissections remained a gold standard for teaching anatomy.

So the question for medical schools is: What is the best use of undergraduates limited time? Especially if the bulk of those undergraduates plan to become family doctors?

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Dissection debate: Why are medical schools cutting back on cadavers?