Neurophobia Among Medical Students: Is Virtual Teaching the Answer?

Neurophobia is well recognized as dissuading medical students from neurocentric specialties and limiting the success of neurology and neurosurgery teaching at medical school. Past studies have associated neurophobia with deficiencies in medical education. We performed a cross-sectional analysis of medical students' confidence and perceived level of knowledge in recognizing the following neurosurgical and neurological emergencies: ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, status epilepticus, subarachnoid hemorrhage, increased intracranial pressure, acute hydrocephalus, spinal cord injury, cauda equina syndrome, and traumatic brain injury. In addition, we assessed the usefulness of virtual seminars in neurosurgery and neurology teaching.

Medical students from King's College London were invited to a virtual teaching session. We obtained preteaching and postteaching scores for students' subjective ability to recognize specific neurologic and neurosurgical emergencies, along with their confidence in the subject.

Ninety-seven medical students attended the teaching session. For our sample group's subjective rating on their confidence in neurology or neurosurgery as a subject, we obtained a mean score of 3.87 and a median score of 4. Across all domains, there was a significant forward shift in the distribution curve of scores after teaching. We obtained statistically significant differences for all 9 neurologic and neurosurgical emergencies evaluated in our questionnaire (asymptotic significance <0.001). Median scores for all 9 conditions improved after the teaching session, with >50% positive ranks seen within each group. Across the teaching modalities compared, placement teaching was the highest scoring, whereas online lectures received a better rating than in-person lectures.

In neurosurgery teaching, virtual seminars may compensate for deficiencies that exist within medical education, hence limiting the effects of neurophobia.