The journey of becoming a physician is long and tedious. As a medical student, you must withstand long hours of basic medical research, clinical research, and epidemiological research. You must understand the pathologies behind the diagnosis and treatment of different diseases and patients. You learn from a physician-educator but by the time you graduate, you’re expected to be a physician-educator yourself. You must immerse yourself in the cellular and molecular world, understand the science & the art of each organ and tissue, and master the art of professionalism as per the medical field standards. There’s too much to know and do in this profession. Medical school is probably the only college where students must comprehend all taught concepts to a fault.

With this realization, medical schools have started shifting their curriculum from being educator-centric to a more patient-centric curriculum. This approach helps medical students learn complex concepts faster and retain most of what they learn. The student-centric approach also supports lifelong learning; medical students learn how to educate and reeducate themselves even after they leave medical school. One way of encouraging student-centric learning is incorporating visual tools into the medical school curriculum.

Visual Tools in Medical Education

Today, educators use different visual aids to make medical school more interesting and hard concepts easier to understand. Some of the common visual tools in medical education are:

Medical Training Videos
Videos help students learn faster & retain more. Medical students can now access comprehensive videos on different platforms across the internet, some free and others at an affordable subscription charge. A good example of medical training videos is these [clinical science resources](https://www.osmosis.org/clinical-sciences) on Osmosis's comprehensive video library. These resources cover a wide range of clinical science topics, allowing students to consume difficult content and memorize key information efficiently.Video technology is also immortalizing medical expertise. It has, for example, enabled the recording and live streaming of real-life medical procedures for future learning. Ground-breaking medical knowledge can now move easily from the hospital or research facility to the classroom. Documentation of procedures is also improving the medical field by keeping [medical practitioners](https://upvio.com/blog/practice-management/building-a-successful-medical-practice-management-best-practices) accountable- it’s easier to keep track of unethical or careless behavior in medical practice.By immortalizing medical expertise, video learning has become instrumental to lifelong physician training. New diseases come up all the time. There’s always new knowledge, research findings, discoveries, and innovations in the medical space. Physicians and other medical practitioners must keep abreast of all these new developments at all times. Storing this knowledge in video means new knowledge can be conveniently accessed by other practitioners and future generations of physicians.

Web and mobile apps
Medical students who wish to learn, understand, and memorize huge volumes of information often use medical flashcards. But making flashcards for hundreds of medicine and healthcare subject areas is both tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, medical students can now access online flashcards for any subject area. These online flashcards maximize memory retention through self-paced learning and spaced repetition. They are better than physical flashcards because you don’t need to create them, plus they’re readily accessible through mobile apps anywhere, anytime. An example of such an app is [the Prognosis app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prognosis-your-diagnosis/id392489854) which provides students with real clinical cases for practicing their diagnostic skills.

Infographics
Educational infographics for medical school simplify complex medical facts, making them easier to understand. They also help students to visualize statistics and understand medical processes better. They make it easy for students to organize vast amounts of information logically, which helps them meet the high literacy standards in medical school.

Virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) enables life-like simulations and outstanding visual tools for medical education. It creates a safe virtual environment for students to get an immersive experience of the intricacies of the medical field. Through VR, medical students get a chance to practice their skills on complicated medical procedures, without endangering the lives of real patients. University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, and other prestigious medical schools in the first world are already using VR as a visual education tool. There are many more notable benefits of VR, including:
Bridging the gap that has existed for a long time between medical theories and practicals. VR provides simulations that replicate real-world scenarios in 3D, so students can conduct practicals in a safe learning environment.
Helping learners refine their techniques through repetition, especially when dealing with complex surgical training. Complex procedures are hard to train because they require expensive equipment. VR is eliminating the need for equipment. Remote accessibility for teachers and students. Physical classes are no longer a necessity for medical students.

Anatomical charts
The human anatomy is a must-know for all medical practitioners, both in active practice and in clinical settings. The easiest way to memorize and understand the human anatomy is using anatomical charts. They make memory storage and recollection of information a breeze. Students can easily make their charts or buy premium colourful, diagrammatic anatomical charts. Charts are foldable and lightweight, making them easy to display and store in the classroom or student dorms.

How Visual Tools Make Complex Medical Concepts More Engaging For Medical Students

Visual aids effectively enhance student interest, comprehension, and retention in medical school. They break down bulky content into easy-to-consume chunks of information and concepts. Besides that, visual tools enhance:

Attention span

[A 2015 study by Canadian researchers](https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/) concluded that humans have an average attention span of merely 8 seconds. This study may not give a comprehensive depiction of how people consume and retain information. It, however, sheds light on the incredibly short period that medical educators have to capture and retain the attention of students. Engaging visuals in medical school enhances the attention span significantly.

Comprehension

83% of what the human brain learns is from the sense of sight. This is because our brains process images [way faster than the written word](https://oit.williams.edu/files/2010/02/using-images-effectively.pdf). Using visual images and diagrams will significantly improve comprehension for medical students.

Adherence to instructions

Visuals help medical students retain, recall, and understand information better. It, therefore, follows that they can better adhere to given instructions.

Student inclusion

Just like other college students, medical students experience a wide range of literacy, language, culture, mental health, financial, and other background challenges. The lengthy and demanding class sessions in medical school exacerbate the situation for some students. That’s why [the dropout rate for American medical schools](https://www.aamc.org/media/48526/download) is as high as 16-18%. To curb this challenge, medical schools have to be more inclusive and cater to the diverse challenges that students face. Visual tools help bridge existing gaps between medical students. Good visual tools emphasize the main message, making it easier for students from different generations and backgrounds to grasp the important concepts. Visuals also bridge language gaps by having clear headings, labels, and captions.

Thematic chunking

One infographic or chart, for example, can connect and summarize the relationship between diseases with different pathogenic mechanisms. This eliminates the need for a student to study one disease at a time and then struggle to make a connection in the end. Thematic chunking gives students a few streamlined trends and themes that are centered on the core concepts of different diseases. These themes and trends are easy to follow because they’re presented in smooth process/flow imagery. For example, one diagram can help students connect dots (e.g. physiology-pathophysiology-histology) during the diagnoses and presentation of a patient’s illness.

Clinical correlation of diseases

Educators in medical schools use visual aids to create a free-flowing story for students to follow. Complex clinical test results, e.g. in pathology or pathophysiology, combined with pattern recognition in a free-flowing video or online flashcards. Another example is when students study pulmonary function tests through a simplified illustration on infographics. They can use infographics to, for example, study the respiratory tract and easily identify airway obstructions at different sections.

Conclusion

The incorporation of visual tools in medical education is vital to better comprehension, attention span, thematic chunking, and so on. Adding visuals such as infographics or charts also enhances the retention of important information. The consequence of this is lower attrition rates in medical school and [more fulfilling careers in the medical field](https://hackmd.io/).