**1. Introduction**

This chapter is a discussion of medical schools' education curricula in preparing medical doctor practitioners to practice medicine in their countries and globally. The discussion will answer the questions about whether the worldwide medical schools' curricula are responding to the communities' needs with consideration of the most recent up-to-date evidence in the medical sciences and the psychosocial sciences combined. It will also answer the question of what kind of theoretical frameworks are being in use, and are these frameworks considering a comprehensive and holistic view of the beneficiaries of health care.

The idea of this discussion has emerged after a long-life career in health care as nurses working closely with doctors in primary, secondary, and tertiary care settings. Our long experience of over 30 years' duration as nurses and faculty members exposed us to practicing doctors as we were student nurses, as graduate nurses practicing nursing in multiple care settings, as academics (faculty members) teaching medical students some of their non-medical courses, and as colleagues working with medical doctors on research projects on different topic areas and research designs. This journey has enabled us to capture some crucial areas of strengths and weaknesses in the preparation of medical doctors that may benefit from using a critical lens that exposes issues of concern for the sake of the wider community and the beneficiaries of medical healthcare services. In this chapter, our aim is to elucidate these points by referring to the historical development of medical practice and education, to medical schools' curricula and mission statements in general without reference to any program or school in particular, and to explain the theoretical models of teaching and practice that have been in place over the last few decades at schools of medicine. This will be a critical eye of how medical education and medical practice have evolved (or not evolved) to meet the psycho-socio-cultural changes that occurred over time. What is presented in the following pages is not a definitive argument of medical education but rather a case that draws heavily on our observations that have long been echoed elsewhere.
