Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

From a great comic strip found here: (http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=754#comic).

Check it out – it’s well worth wasting several hours.

Sleepy time

I’m not saying that my classes are boring but …

… when it’s cold outside and 30 degrees Celsius in the lecture theater it suddenly becomes very hard to keep my eyes open. As the instructor drones on about pathology, anatomy or histology I can feel Morpheus come and tempt me away from class to whatever wonderful world awaits in my dreams…

The picture above captures at least two of my peers sound asleep during the last lecture.

Week 9

Today marks the end of week 9, the 1/2 point of the semester. I have just finished perhaps one of the most intense blocks of study I have had yet and now will start something completely new on Monday. The general feeling in the class is one of low grade anxiety. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to consolidate what I have just learned before being hit with new material. I hate to say it but it’s already time to get serious about the exams, even though they are 2 1/2 months away…I don’t remember doing this in undergrad or even for my Masters. I guess it just goes to show that Medical School is a different sort of beast altogether.

Quick update

I’m just between classes right now but wanted to update the blog with the results from the 3rd year rotation selection.

I got my first choice which means I start with Surgery in September. This will no doubt be intense and I’m still not sure it is the best way to go but what’s done is done. From the looks of it, there are at least 3 of my friends who got the same rotation, which is also good news.

Pattern recognition

The fine art of diagnosis is still a mystery to me at this point in my med career. There are gaps in my knowledge and tricks or the trade that I simply haven’t learned yet. There is a component of medicine that is not taught in my classes and not covered in any text; that is – how experienced Doctors make decisions. At this point the art of diagnosis is simply pattern recognition – that is to say, that I am taking what I have learned so far, the clusters of symptoms and associated signs, and applying these to patients. If they fit into the clinical picture then I can confirm with further testing. If the tests do not support what I believe the problem to be, I then have to start over. Unfortunately, there is more to diagnosis than this, there is a logically organized thought process which I haven’t learned yet, which hasn’t necessarily been taught in school. It was therefore interesting to see then that there are those who are studying how doctors think and come to diagnostic decisions. The study and some of the results are detailed in a current article in the New Yorker [WHAT’S THE TROUBLE? by JEROME GROOPMAN].