About a hundred students at the Emory School of Medicine gathered during lunch earlier this fall, scarfing down their meal before a panel discussion. They came, on their own time, to learn how to talk to their future patients about gun safety. They only had an hour.“That was the most we’ve talked about it this year,” said Alyssa Greenhouse, a second-year med student at Emory.Greenhouse organized the lunch session for her fellow medical students because learning how to discuss firearms with patients is not a part of the mandatory medical school curriculum.“We have had entire problem-based learning sessions on talking about [quitting tobacco]. We have to take a history with every patient, and it asks: ‘Are you safe in the home?’ ‘Do you wear your helmet?’ ‘Do you wear your seatbelt?’ but we just don’t talk about firearms,” said Greenhouse.And she has a theory about why that is.“It’s because it’s all wrapped up in the politics, and medicine’s supposed to be separate from the politics,” she said. “So I think that’s why a lot of doctors and med students don’t talk about it.”Only about one in five doctors ask their patients about their access to firearms. Part of the reason why doctors don’t ask about guns along with cigarettes, alcohol and seatbelts goes back to medical school.
