For more than a century, going to medical school has meant basically the same thing: four years of learning about human anatomy and physiology, and about how to diagnose and treat disease.
But in the past few years, more medical schools have added optional “scholarly concentration” tracks that students can pursue even while earning a medical degree. You might think of it as a “minor” — an add-on to the “major” of medicine — a chance to focus on a topic long before students pick a particular type of care to study in residency.
Now, a University of Michigan Medical School team has published the first national study of this idea. It shows that 74 percent of the top U.S. medical schools offer scholarly concentrations to their students.