<p>what does a clinical professor do?</p>
<p>Teaches medical students during the last two years of medical school. This would be while actually taking care of the patient, and would also include teaching residents. </p>
<p>A typical inpatient team while on an internal medicine or pediatrics clerkship looks like this:</p>
<p>Attending (Clinical Professor)
Supervising Resident (2nd or 3rd year Resident)
2 Interns (1st year residents)
2 3rd year medical students </p>
<p>The interns are primarily responsible for the details of patient care (writing orders for labs, medications, nursing activities, consults, etc), but having the higher ups makes sure that things don't get missed. </p>
<p>How the clinical prof/attending actually teaches is highly variable. Some may assign topics for medical students to read about then go over them the next day, some may hold impromptu lectures during down time, some may go over topics related to a particular patient while at the bedside.</p>
<p>A Clinical Professor's duties vary according to the program or hospital in question. </p>
<p>In general, a clinical professor is a physician in private practice that has an academic appointment at a a medical school/teaching hospital. That academic appointment allows him to interact with residents/interns and to have his patients assigned to the "teaching service", where residents participate in the care.</p>
<p>A clinical professor deals more with residents and interns than medical students. Most of the time the interaction with med students occur if they happen to be rotating through one of the clerkships in the service.</p>
<p>I see. thanks for the responses. What about the people who teach medical students lecture-style in the first two years? Are they generally PhD-holders or is there a good portion of MD's doing that?</p>
<p>Of the schools I'm familiar with, most pre-clinical profs are PhD's with the occasional MD sprinkled in for certain topics depending on need or expertise. For example, at my school, one of the pediatric nephrologists did our lectures on kidney physiology because there wasn't anyone in our Department of Physiology who was really doing a lot of kidney work. </p>
<p>The other portion of the first two years is usually some sort of "how to be a doctor" class which covers things like physical exam skills, history taking, ethics, normal development, effects of aging, spirituality and cultural competency in medicine, biostats, and so on, had a large number of MD's take part, but also included MPH's, Genetics counselors, Registered Dietitians, nurses, and other allied health professionals. But mostly MD's.</p>
<p>The academic rank "clinical professor" is a flexible term. As MyOpinion noted, the duties vary according to the program or hospital in question. The Harvard faculty handbook states only a broad requirement for "teaching and/or research and/or clinical scholarship."</p>
<p>See examples from:
The BU</a> Faculty Handbook
Robert</a> Wood Johnson Medical School (Academic Titles)
UCSF</a> School of Medicine - Association of Clinical Faculty<a href="volunteer%20PMD's,%20as%20described%20by%20MyOpinion">/url</a>
Harvard [url=<a href="http://www.hms.harvard.edu/fa/handbook/purplebook/i.html%5DStatus">http://www.hms.harvard.edu/fa/handbook/purplebook/i.html]Status</a>, Rank, Titles and Terms of Appointments</p>