School or Scam? St. Augustine School of Medical Assistants

My blog is being bombarded with spam comments from a purported school called "St. Augustine School of Medical Assistants." Of course, I have not published any of the numerous attempts but I am getting tired of dealing with it. I have reported the person who is trying to post the comments, "m rana," to Google several times but to no avail.

As a public service, I will present what I have found out about this school.

It claims to be accredited, but the alleged accrediting organization, The National Accreditation and Certification Board (NACB), is not recognized by any legitimate medical authority. In fact, it "accredits approved alternative holistic health practitioner programs and certifies graduates of said programs which meet all of the National Accreditation and Certification Board qualifications."

Graduates of St. Augustine School of Medical Assistants are not eligible to sit for the Certified Medical Assistant examination.

Donald A. Balasa, JD, MBA, executive director and legal counsel for the American Association of Medical Assistants, has written about this school saying its ads are misleading and calling it a "diploma mill." [Here is a guide explaining how to spot a diploma mill.]

The St. Augustine School of Medical Assistants appears on a list of " Unauthorized Schools and Invalid Degrees" posted by the State of Oregon. The site says, " The following colleges and universities are not permitted to enroll Oregon students or offer degree programs in Oregon. Degrees from these colleges are not valid in Oregon, and may not be used for academic or employment purposes, or acknowledged as a credential in any public forum or publication, including on a website or in communication related to professional practice or participation in professional organizations."

If you want further information, I suggest you check out a forum on the Indeed.com website detailing several complaints about this school.

Addendum [3/18/13 9:30 a.m.]: I just received notification that "m rana" has posted a comment on this site. I am going to publish it just to prove to you that it's true. I'm not Jewish but I believe they call it "chutzpah."

Addendum [8/3/18 3:45 p.m.]; Someone emailed me saying she has decided to take action. Due to problems with the Blogger website, she was unable to post a comment. Here is her plan: 

My daughter was also scammed by this so called “Medical Assistant School”.  They are not a legitimate business and are operating as a “business” from the British Virgin Islands. If there are other victims how would like to work together, please contact me at medicalassistantscam@gmail.com. We are stronger together than divided. Thank you to the Skeptical Scalpel Blog for making this public plea possible.

Law school revamps final year curriculum. Will med schools ever do the same?

The New York Times reports that NYU Law School is planning to change its third-year curriculum to better prepare its graduates for the realities of legal practice today. In case you don’t know, law school graduates are having a tough time finding work and many require on-the-job training to make up for what they didn’t learn in school.

From the article: “There is a growing disconnect between what law schools are offering and what the marketplace is demanding in the 21st century,” said … the chairman of the panel of alumni recommending the changes.

A revelation from the article is that the third year of law school has been considered a waste of time by many observers.

“One of the well-known facts about law school is it never took three years to do what we are doing; it took maybe two years at most, maybe a year-and-a-half,” Larry Kramer, the former dean of Stanford Law School, said in a 2010 speech.

There has been much debate in the legal academy over the necessity of a third year. Many students take advantage of clinical course work, but the traditional third year of study is largely filled by elective courses. While classes like “Nietzsche and the Law” and “Voting, Game Theory and the Law” might be intellectually broadening, law schools and their students are beginning to question whether, at $51,150 a year, a hodgepodge of electives provides sufficient value.

Although I wasn’t aware of this issue in law schools, it sounds familiar in a way. Copy the above paragraphs, take your word processing program and replace “law school” with “medical school” and “third year’ with “fourth year” and you will have an accurate story about medical education.

The fourth year of medical school has been known to be a waste of time for at least 40 years. Most schools allow some or all of it to be electives of the students’ choosing. This results in anesthesia rotations in Paris and dermatology rotations in New York City. In a previous blog, I have pointed out some of the problems of both the third and fourth years of med school.

A 2011 piece in the New York Times Magazine pointed out that some law firms are providing new associates with intensive training in the nuts and bolts of lawyering that they apparently don’t get in school. For example, although they had studied mergers in law school, graduates had no idea how to make a merger happen.

As an interesting parallel, some surgical residency programs have begun to offer “boot camps” (See links here and here.) as a way to teach incoming first-year trainees some of the material they should have learned in medical school. Apparently, this is necessary in Scotland too, where the boot camp lists such topics as communication skills for surgeons, polytrauma, how to lead a ward round and handling and writing the evidence. These all seem like subjects appropriate for a med school curriculum, but lacking.

I hope that someday medical schools will recognize the problem as NYU Law School has done. Meanwhile, I will keep cranking out the blogs.

Common sense lacking in schools

What is going on in schools today? No, I’m not talking about what seems to be an epidemic of teachers having sex with students. That’s old news.

Recently, there have been more examples of what I can only call an inexplicable lack of common sense on the part of teachers and others at schools. I have blogged about this before when school officials in New York attempted to ban words that might upset some students.

A six-year-old boy, accused of being a bully, was deemed by his teacher to need remediation. A second teacher was consulted. She had the perfect solution--have all the other students in the class repeatedly punch him. Another teacher reported the incident. The child’s mother was not happy. Here is the response of a school official from TV station KENS. “Steve Linscomb, a spokesperson for the district, confirms that the teacher will not be hired again within the school district, but suggests the incident was a result of a lack of experience. ‘This teacher is a relatively young teacher and just needs to be re-educated and reminded what needs to happen in the classroom in order for it to be a safe learning environment,’ he told KENS." No, It’s not about experience or re-education. This teacher has no common sense.

A 17-year-old student was allowed to lose consciousness during an asthmatic attack while the school nurse looked on. Why? His mother had not signed a form authorizing use of an inhaler. It gets worse. The the story says the nurse not only failed to call an ambulance, she locked the door of the office with the boy inside. The school’s response? “Deltona High School and Verona County officials stand by the nurse's decision.” The kid would have been better off had he been in the street. Bystanders would have at least called 911.

At a school field day, two girls were sunburned to the extent that their mother took them to a hospital that evening. It was raining that morning and their mother did not apply sunscreen. When the sun came out later that day, the girls were not permitted to use sunscreen. Why not? According to a published report, “The school district's sunscreen policy, which forbids teachers from applying sunscreen to students, and only allows students to apply it to their own bodies if they have a doctor's note authorizing it, is based on a statewide law.” No one thought to take the children out of the sun or call their mother to come to apply sunscreen. Oh by the way, one of the girls has a type of albinism. Tell me please, how easy do you think it is to obtain a doctor’s note authorizing the application of sunscreen, a non-prescription substance?

In case you think that this is a uniquely American phenomenon, here’s a similar story from England. Pupils in a creative writing class were told to write a note to their mothers as if they had only a few hours to live. When he got home from school, one 14-year-old boy handed the essay to his mother who thought it was a suicide note and was understandably upset. The school apologized "for any distress."

What is going on here? A six-year-old is beaten up by his classmates at the direction of a teacher. What is the lesson for the “bully” and the other students? A nurse watches a child try to die from an asthma attack and does nothing. Two children are sunburned because a doctor’s note is required for the application of sunscreen. A suicide note as a creative writing exercise is understandably of great concern to a child's mother.

These teachers and administrators are supposed to be educating our young. And people ask me why one of my daughters has chosen to homeschool (or rather “unschool”) her two children.

Horace Greeley: “Common sense is uncommon.”

Skeptical Scalpel: “Common sense cannot be taught.”

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