Jennifer Marie J. Yang, MD

I referred to the Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine (INTARMED) program in a blog post about my burgeoning interest in the medical humanities, and I thought I’d write about it a bit more here.

We’ll start with the basics first. Generally, Philippine medical schools require completion of a 4-year baccalaureate degree prior to entering medical school; the most well-known ones are Biology and Psychology majors, although I had classmates who had degrees in Business Administration and Food Technology. This would mean 4 years of pre-medical studies + 4 years of Medicine + 1 year of internship.

INTARMED shortens the pre-medical studies to 2 years instead of 4. The first INTARMED class started in 1982-83 academic year and graduated in 1989. College freshmen who enter the INTARMED program are part of the College of Medicine from the beginning (“direct entrants”), unlike the people who enter medical school proper with a baccalaureate degree under their belts. Most people know the INTARMED program is a “shortcut” to medical school, but not everyone knows that INTARMED actually refers to the entire medical school curriculum.

The first two years of INTARMED (pre-medical studies) are designated Learning Unit (LU) I and II. Medical school proper are Learning Units III through VI, while the clinical internship is Learning Unit VII. So the people who come into first medical school proper are called “lateral entrants” or simply “laterals” as they enter the program at LU III, as opposed to the 40 “direct entrants” who come into the program after graduation from high school. Our class had 120 laterals (class that entered medical school in 1994; 60 males and 60 females); currently [2021] the college accepts 140 laterals (70 males, 70 females).

How does the “magic 40” get selected? First step: express your interest in the program. The application form for the University of the Philippines (UP) asks a question (something like this): “Are you interested in the seven-year INTARMED program?”, which is answered by checking the corresponding box for YES or NO. My classmates and I often joke that this little box sealed our fates.

The top 50 males and 50 females who indicate interest in the INTARMED program (judged by scores on the UP College Admission Test, or UPCAT, combined with a projected university grade) are interviewed by faculty members of the College of Medicine, and these people from the admissions committee select 20 males and 20 females for admission into INTARMED LU I.

Upon entering LU I, the 40 of us were divided into blocks of 20, with 10 males and 10 females in each block. We were blocks 9 and 10 (designations by the university – all freshmen are allocated to “blocks”; one attends all classes with the same block for the semester). While everyone else in the university could choose individual classes after the first semester (i.e., students do not belong to a block anymore), we remained block 9 and block 10 all throughout the two years in pre-medicine courses. It probably was just easier to do that on the administration’s end. It was great for enrollment and we all got along for the most part, but the disadvantage was we couldn’t pick individual physical education (P.E.) classes… somehow our block ended up with Fencing in one semester and Advanced Fencing in the next one. One semester was enough for a taste of the sport, but the second one was a bit too much.

Since it was a fast-track program, we had heavier academic loads compared to most college students during the academic year as well as for the summer in between LU I and II. One semester usually has 18-21 units (credits), and the summer session has 6 units. We had 21-24 per semester, and 9 units for the summer session.

33 (or was it 34?) of us made it all the way through medical school. Some left in the first weeks of pre-med, others completed the first two or more years before leaving. A Bachelor of Science in Basic Medical Sciences degree (BSBMS) is granted to the student after LU IV (second year of medicine proper) – whether or not the student goes on to LU V, VI and VII. I guess this just goes to show that people evolve – sometimes what you want as a college freshman doesn’t turn out to be what you want to do for the rest of your life. Is there a flaw in the selection process? Can’t really say. Everyone is different, and everyone is influenced by people, places, situations around them. To that end, people can continue to change even after medical school – of the people who finished LU VII and are licensed physicians, not all of us are practicing doctors either.

The pre-medicine curriculum, as expected, was science-heavy: zoology, chemistry, physics; plus the general education (GE) subjects as required by the university of all students: communication arts, history, social sciences, etc. I wish we had more of the liberal arts beyond the required GE subjects, but we didn’t have space in our 4 semesters + 1 summer. We also had a series of subjects called Introduction to Patient Care (IPC, a subject delivered every Wednesday during the academic year for 3 semesters), of which I do not remember much… but I think it was supposed to make us more empathetic and attuned to the psychosocial and emotional aspects of medicine as opposed to the scientific side of it. We had our first patient experience in IPC. It was the first time we dressed in all-white outfits, signifying we were medical students (see accompanying picture).

Of course since we were pre-medical students our focus wasn’t the diagnosis and management of the patients we saw that day, but rather the psychosocial stuff. This patient interaction evolves through medical school and beyond – the findings from the interview (history) and physical examination eventually take center-stage and the psychosocial gets pushed aside. Some medical specialties involve the psychosocial more than others, but generally the focus shifts more and more towards medical diagnosis and management the further you get away from being a medical student.

Anyway: all in all, this journey through INTARMED saved me two years of education. Which I promptly “used up” spending an extra two years doing a research fellowship after Rehabilitation Medicine residency + clinical fellowship. But that’s another story.

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