General medical practice as a guideline for preclinical anatomy teaching? The veins.

The amount of time assigned for teaching anatomy to medical undergraduates has been drastically reduced in all countries of the world during the sixties. This restriction has intensified the debate about the contents to be taught. The present study is intended to be a contribution to defining, against this background, a "tronc commun", a basic stock of anatomical knowledge that should be required from every medical student, whatever clinical speciality he may eventually engage in. The criterion proposed is the need of anatomical knowledge in general medical practice. With regard to the veins, the following conclusions have emerged from a questionnaire directed to general practitioners: 1) 92.8% of the vessels were agreed upon by the physicians asked. 2) General medical relevance was granted to 9.6% of the vessels mentioned in the international anatomical nomenclature. These results, which are in accordance with those recorded for the other chapters investigated so far, suggest that an adaptation of the amount of information taught to the time disponible in our days is possible, without endangering the basic knowledge necessary for general clinical practice. But the results also show that any reduction beneath the time necessary for teaching these notions jeopardizes the fundamental education indispensable to every physician. Thus, they clearly contradict tendencies considering that anatomy has become a branch that can be neglected in modern medical curricula.