medical education

ABSTRACT Death anxiety pervades modern medical practice, affecting both healthcare providers and patients in ways that significantly impact therapeutic relationships and end-of-life care. While clinical research has documented widespread death anxiety among physicians and patients, conventional psychological approaches treat mortality-related distress as a problem to be managed rather than a sacred threshold to be crossed. This essay examines death anxiety through the comparative lens of established psychological and medical literature alongside our theological framework of being and non-being, drawing on the foundational contributions of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Cicely Saunders, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Rami Shapiro. Recent neuroscientific research revealing organized brain activity during cardiac arrest challenges assumptions about consciousness and death, suggesting that dying may involve heightened rather than diminished awareness. The Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum—divine contraction or concealment—offers a theological framework that reframes apparent absence as the most profound form of divine presence, transforming death from pure negation to sacred encounter. This perspective suggests that healthcare providers' systematic avoidance of death-related dialogue creates an "elephant in the therapeutic room" that undermines effective care, while understanding patients as "sacred texts" requiring hermeneutic engagement transforms clinical practice from purely technical intervention to contemplative presence. The integration of theological insight with clinical research points toward transformative implications for medical education, institutional culture, and therapeutic relationships that honor both scientific rigor and spiritual depth. Rather than eliminating death anxiety through avoidance or management techniques, this framework suggests that mortality awareness can facilitate authentic presence and spiritual deepening in medical practice. The findings support developing integrated approaches that recognize human beings as fundamentally spiritual as well as biological entities, creating spaces where death anxiety becomes not a clinical problem but a spiritual invitation to transformation that serves both healer and patient in their shared journey through the mystery of existence.

ABSTRACT Medical education has its core values of confidentiality and formal conduct while social media involved sharing and openness, connection which seems to be contradictory for medical professionalism. Main purpose of this study was to explore the students' perception, attitudes and barriers about the professional use of social media and to assess the experiences of undergraduate on the improvement of clinical teaching through the incorporation of social media applications. A cross sectional survey based study was carried out at Oman Medical College. All final year students consented to participate were included in the study. Data was collected on self-administered questionnaire in which core elements were divided – demographics, type and frequencies of different social media usage, student’s perception about WhatsApp utilization and barriers of not using social media. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0). Data were expressed in frequencies, mean and percentages. A total of 76 participants were enrolled in which 5 (6.6%) were male and 71 (93.4%) were aged between 20-25 years of age. Among all 57 (75%) were Omani nationals and almost all (98.7%) participants used social media of which 35 (46.1%) were android, 29 (38.2%) IOS, and 12 (15.8%) were other operating system users. All participants daily spend some time on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. In contrast, responses of all participants’ indicated that they never make use of Wiki, Chat On and hangout. More than half of the study participants believed that lack of internet access is one the main barrier of non-utilization of social media. Medical students prefer online media for communication and medical information along with usage of WhatsApp in medical education and learning is helpful for improving and enhancing the interactive learning. The students’ response emphasizes positive response and experiences of their learning and discussions provided an effective space for integrated small group clinical teaching and learning. Keywords: Social media, medical education, WhatsApp, clinical teaching, learning

Problem-based learning is a well-established model in medical education that was developed by McMaster university in 1969. Several studies have been conducted since then to evaluate its effectiveness on several learning domains. However, unequivocal evidence supporting its superiority over the traditional teaching is not established due to contradicting results. To evaluate recent studies comparing problem-based learning to traditional teaching, focusing on medical students’ academic performance, satisfaction and motivation, and knowledge retention and recall. An electronic search, limited to the last 10 years, was conducted through PubMed, Academic search complete, Medline, CIANHIL and PsychInfo. A manual search of the references of the selected papers was also carried. Quality assessment of studies was conducted to establish the level of evidence supporting the individual outcome variables. The search yielded 109 articles for title and abstract screening, 5 of which met the inclusion criteria. One more article was identified through the manual search of the references yielding a total of 6 studies. No evidence was established to support the superiority of PBL over didactic teaching in terms of improving medical students’ academic performance and satisfaction and motivation as the studies reported contradictory outcomes. Limited evidence was established to support the superiority of problem-based learning in improving medical students’ knowledge retention and recall as it was derived from a single low quality study. More research into this area is still required to establish an objective assessment and to overcome the inherent limitations of research in problem-based learning.