AAMC launches awareness campaign for medical schools and teaching hospitals

One of the ads from the Association of American Medical Colleges features UW discoveries.

The Association of American Medical Colleges has launched a public awareness campaign to help the nation better understand the contributions of medical schools and teaching hospitals to everyone’s health. “Tomorrow’s Doctors, Tomorrow’s Cures.” is the theme.

Among its messages are the innovations in patient care pioneered at teaching hospitals, how excellence in medical education translates to high quality patient care, and why the zeal for cutting health care costs could slow the pace of medical research.

One public service ad lists nine major patient care breakthroughs resulting from research at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals. Two of the accomplishments — successful bone marrow transplants and the identification of fetal alcohol syndrome — were the work of UW medical faculty.

Dr. E. Donnall Thomas received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing bone marrow transplantation to protect patients from near-fatal doses of chemotherapy and radiation required to eradicate their cancers. He is a professor emeritus of medicine and a Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientist.

The late Dr. David Smith, former professor of pediatrics, and his student, Dr. Kenneth Jones, were the first to alert the medical community to the seriousness of alcohol abuse during pregnancy. They defined fetal alcohol syndrome and its characteristic physical, mental and behavioral features, and educated mothers-to-be.

After highlighting these and other discoveries benefiting humanity, the ad goes on to say that public support is essential for medical schools and teaching hospitals to continue to make research progress in other areas, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and AIDS.

More extensive lists of historic biomedical research discoveries that took place at the UW and other academic medical centers are grouped by institution at the Association of American Medical Colleges Web site, http://www.aamc.org/tomorrowsdocs/
Leila Gray