Abstract
Food eponymophilia in medicine describes a phenomenon by which diseases or pathologies are named for food items, such as “oat cell carcinoma” or “coffee bean nucleus.” Some argue that these metaphors enrich medical education by providing familiar analogies to communicate pathology that is otherwise difficult to describe. Others argue that these metaphors are esoteric, burdensome, culturally irrelevant, and outdated. Few studies have ever focused on the use of metaphors in medical education, and even fewer have focused particularly on pathology or food eponyms. We aim to investigate the use of food eponyms in undergraduate medical education, particularly in pathology education, at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. We used an interactive learning module to objectively assess whether or not students learn and retain pathology knowledge better using food eponyms, and a post-module survey to assess student perception of the use of these visual mnemonics within pathology educational activities. Results suggest that students not only learn and retain pathology knowledge through this type of activity, but that they also find these eponyms and mnemonics useful as they prepare for their USMLE step 1 exam, clinical clerkship, and future practice. This study is the first of its kind to investigate the usefulness of food eponymophilia in medical education and suggests that students empirically benefit from the use of these memory aids and find this form of learning enjoyable. Preclinical pathology education should make use of these tools in an effort to make pathology as palatable as possible.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Data are available on request from the authors.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Melissa Cowan for her assistance in creating the interactive learning assessment module, Matthew Robinson for his assistance in data analysis and statistics, and Andrea Berry for her assistance with manuscript preparation for submission. Without their contributions, this project would not have been possible.
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This project is funded by an internal, departmental grant at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.
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Seto, C., Zayat, V. A Spoonful of Eponyms Helps the Pathology Go Down: Using Food Eponyms and Visual Mnemonics in Preclinical Pathology Education. Med.Sci.Educ. 32, 131–140 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-021-01474-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-021-01474-w