Complaint Review: Jefferson Medical College

At 54 years old and with an immigrant wife and two young kids to care as I struggle to survive on a daily basis I realize I ruined my life by going to Jefferson Medical College. Frankly I never imagined a Phi Beta Kappa, summa c*m laude graduate of Dickinson College, where President Buchannan was an alumni, who has ended up with so much financial trouble and career difficulties at middle age unless of course he or she was a convicted felon and I do not know of any convicted felons who went to Dickinson.

I knew my first week at Jefferson Medical College back in 1976 that the quality of education was extremely poor and I remember during a lunch meeting with the past Chairman of Psychiatry, Dr Fink, at Winston's in Philadelphia, I commented that I was thinking of quiting medical school and following my father's footsteps as a s****.> The education at Jefferson was sketchy with it appearing the professors could not get a good handle on how to properly present the huge bulk of medical information necessary to learn in medical education these days. And early on in my career as a professional student I began to suspect something was terribly wrong with the testing procedures when some of my exam grades did not meet my expectations or abilities for no good reasons as all. What I was to learn later on during a meeting with a fellow Dickinson College alumni, Dr Mirabile, was that insider alumni connected students at Jefferson had the situation wired and passed exact copies of exams from previous years which were repeated yearly onto each other. I was intentionally cut out of this scam for years by my own classmates whom Dr Mirabile explained to me were not my friends and who all had exact copies of these exams. These other students at Jefferson obviously thought it was fun cutting a Phi Beta Kappa whose father was not an alumni from Jefferson down to size. With the exams all being graded on a curve at Jefferson this created a serious problem for many students in some disciplines. Consider for example that I remember Organic Chemistry in College was so challenging that in my second semester I earned an A and fourth place in my class with a raw score on the final exam of about 60%. There was no such testing scam at Dickinson College and my Organic Chemistry professor, the late Dr Sheely, who had a reputation as the most difficult professor at Dickinson, changed all of the exams himself every semester. If all of the other students in my Organic Chemistry class had exact copies of the exam prior to the final exam date they would have all received raw scores in the 90s and a 60 would have been a poor grade and maybe even a failing grade instead of a top grade of an A.

Than in my clinical years at Jefferson although I did well in all of my required clinical work I was to learn that there was often a great deal of subjectivity involved in clinical evaluations. My senior year when I ran into some conflicts of interest with some departments regarding my career goals and interests I was to find that although I was doing the same quality of work I was not being rated as well. Furthermore, the required clinical rotations during the third year were not similar in experience and educational value across the board. Students assigned to Internal Medicine at Fitz Mercy, a filthy inner city ghetto hospital, where I initially did a rotation, were kept up all night long every third night doing scut work which medical techs were hired to do such as blood gases and spinal taps. Over the years I was to read many legal negligence cases dealing with spinal taps and injuries to patients and I was in shock that third year medical students were assigned to do this highly risky procedure completely on their own at Fitz Mercy and late at night. I guess I was just lucky none of my patients filed lawsuits regarding painful side effects which often occur from this procedure even when it is done properly. The rotations at upper middle class Main Line Hospitals such as Bryn Mawr and Lankenau were completely different. The on call quarters at these Main Line hospitals were comfortable and the staffs often allowed the medical students to sleep through the night with no calls for scut work and only an occassional call for an important case which you could learn something from. Furthermore, the assigned reading list was different at these hospitals with the material assigned at Fitz Mercy actually from a text which was not used for the final exam at Jefferson. Over the years I was to learn as I educated myself more and more that all medical information is not exactly the same in different texts. Some medical centers and their staffs take different approaches to various diseases and stress different points. These differences are particularly compelling in the Psychiatry section between Harveys textbook of medicine, which was assigned at Fitz Mercy, and Harrison's textbook of medicine, which was assigned at Jefferson's Main Hospital and used for the Internal Medicine exam.

An even bigger problem with having gone to Jefferson Medical College was that when things went wrong and a bright student got tripped up so to speak by his own colleagues, and clearly all of the students actually do rank at the top of intelligence in the country, the staff and other students would rally to protect themselves by taking the position that their colleague who got tripped up and did not perform as well as he or she should have must be mentally ill. As for my assessment of the intellectual capacity of the students I was to learn that although connections were often necessary to secure a place at Jefferson that even with powerful connections there would be no consideration for admission under any circumstances even with a judges letter of recommendation unless your grades in College were unusually high.

Finally there appears to be absolutely no support system for graduates of Jefferson. The staffs, particularly the Chairman, I have discovered are elitists who do not mix with the little guy on the streets which you become in their eyes shortly after graduation. For years I have tried to simply set up an appointment with Dr Vergare, the present Chairman of Psychiatry, to intelligently discuss my own controversial case and to work to bring me back into the mainstream of things. I have even considered changing my mental health care foundation around if some mainstream psychiatrists such as Dr Vergare would work with me on my career and focusing primarily stressing a Natural Health Care approach to mental health care while dropping many of my harsh criticisms of what is going on in many psychiatric circles if only I were given a reason to take this course of action. Yet, Dr Vergare, whom I recently noticed has been assigned as acting Dean at Jefferson is apparently very popular in the Jefferson community for taking the elitist apprach of simply ignoring my requests to get together and work on some professional interests.

It appears unfortunately these problems may exist at all of the other medical schools across the United States many of whom have also refused to confront these and other professional issues with me and who have apparently joined a cruel blacklist of my professional interests in the aftermath of my dispute with a group of sick doctors in Texas in dealing with "The Texas Torture Case". Dr Edeiken, a hypocritically disturbed Radiologist , who was Chairman of Radiology at Jefferson prior to moving to Texas later in life, helped to mastermind this abuse case with Dr Pearlman, a psychiatrist whom I now refer to as "The Texas Butcher, clearly with an interest in covering up for wrongdoing in dealing with my career over the years. I was lured to Texas almost 20 years ago to be hit with the same type of psychiatric human rights abuses as I have committed a lifetime of work to wiping out. More on this story can be found online under "A Physicians Story of Psychiatric Torture", or "The Texas Torture Case" at: http://t1c.blogspot.com

Well, at 54 years old and with my days filled with anxieties daily about what will happen to me and my wife and kids if I am not assisted in making more money soon, I only know that I could have been independently wealthy today with just the money my father and I invested in my medical education if that money were properly invested, instead of flat broke and in big, big financial trouble.

Dr Harold M
Director
Dr H M

CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report.
Liverpool, New York
U.S.A.