Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Jul 16, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 17, 2025 - Sep 11, 2025
Date Accepted: Dec 31, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Dopamine, distraction and disruption: a perspective on how Generation Z might redefine medical education
ABSTRACT
This essay explores, from a reflective and interdisciplinary perspective, how the defining characteristics of Gen Z, such as their familiarity with technology, demand for emotional safety, and resistance to traditional hierarchies, might reshape the ways we teach, learn, and practice medicine. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and the medical education literature, the essay highlights both the promises and challenges posed by this generation: from their potential to destigmatize mental health and strengthen human connection, to risks such as declining empathy, attention dysregulation, digital overexposure, a potential erosion of resilience, and difficulty managing uncertainty. It argues that training future physicians must go outside content delivery and embrace the development of self-regulation, critical thinking, and ethical judgment. As a critical essay, it calls for a deliberate and compassionate adaptation of medical education to cultivate the skills required for a profession increasingly practiced in a context of overstimulation and complexity.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.