medical school

i just looked through my copy of netter's. *_*

t-minus one day, ppl.

itt gbx liveblogs med school

omg i am in a lecture

waht are you learning today?

ingratiate yourself to the professor by making an icebreaking dick joke.

Can't wait to hear about how it's going.

if evan can break ice with his dick he's wasting his time in med school.

it's a lecture about stress management

first day of school, here

good luck dude!

lol, we had assigned "stress management" readings in nursing school, too.

What would have helped more: letting us sleep at some point over clinical weekends.

what are they suggesting that you perscribe to yourself to ease the stress level?

decent lol: caloric restriction retards the aging process = share food with others = feeding your academic rivals in order to eliminate them

another h4st1ngs dude is here, too!

o_O
xpost

Wait, but being hungry is stressful!

Still, that's going to be my new reason for bringing treats to class. I'm trying to destroy everyone else's GPA.

xp - In your class or the one ahead of you? If it's the one ahead of you, and the dude is kind of old, that's my ex.

dude, stay relatively sane <3

("Kind of old" = 38 or 39. Uh, don't tell him I said that, okay?)

dude is a year younger than me.

tomorrow, we meet our dead best friends :D

(not to be flip, or anything)

It will be fine. Also, I think if you're not a bit flip about it at some point, it is less fine. (From my limited experience with cadavers, faces and hands are the worst. But I have never had to dissect a head or a penis... I could see where that could be more alarming.)

Oh i've worked with cadavers before, i'm not worried. curious to see who gets shook, tho

That's the kind of bonding you can't just find anywhere! ;)

gbx, how much orientation stuff did your school do? I am in the middle of a week of basically introductions and icebreaking and drinking time before we get started next week.

Technically, three days, all this week:

Wed -- omg yr in med school, here's yr ID, don't stress, dinner + beerz + start short list of hotties
Thurs -- omg yr in anatomy, do's and don'ts in lab, get acquainted with your 'patient'
Fri -- white coat ceremony

Mon -- let's do it to it

also we had a small group session where we collaboratively drafted up some ideas for our class oath, which were then passed via representative to a larger summit. it will be read tomorrow. i have already determined that some of my classmates are awesome, and that some are idiots.

w/o going into specifics, at least one dude had the temerity to suggest that the care provided to a terminal patient we MET YESTERDAY was a waste of money and that all that money (which obv comes from the big healthcare money bucket and isn't earmarked no way) could, like, be used for medicine for the poor and shit.

him: "seriously, what's all that money REALLY doing?"
me: "...well, XXX is alive."
him: "so what?"
me: " >:( "

Well, most lifetime health care spending happens within the last few months of life, when you're circling the drain. There's a big push in the medical industry to reallocate healthcare dollars to younger, stronger, less-sick people, like they do in a lot of countries with socialized medicine. An example would be giving a limited-resource, like a liver transplant, to a 20-year-old instead of a 70-year-old.

"terminal" wasn't accurate, sorry. this patient (who was presented to the entire class as her mother gave a forceful argument for patient advocacy...ie - confidentiality isn't an issue here) is a child with an illness that will likely end with her dying early. dude almost came right out and said mom should just get over it and let her kid die.

Wow, that guy sounds like a charmer. His bedside manner is going to be fabulous.

Doogie Howser: gay [Started by Ned Raggett (Ned), last updated 2 days ago] 13 new answers
medical school [Started by gbx, last updated 2 days ago] 29 new answers

first dissection today. if you would like me to find your thoracoacromial artery, i will do it for a small fee.

passed first anatomy exam yesterday :D
had group discussion today about race. warning: some of your future doctors are inarticulate d-bags

^^^ feeling better about my chances for getting in

warning: some of your future doctors are inarticulate d-bags
SHOCKAH.

some of your future doctors are inarticulate d-bags

"future"

hey lamp are you applying right now?

gbx you are the real hero

hey dude, thanks

I'm going to have to start preparing my ucas application asap.

The law school and grad school threads got revived, so why not...

This is HARD, but awesome. So far medical school >>>> grad school. (I do not know how law school is. I would still guess >>>, though.) I have had nearly two months of being repeatedly reminded that I know basically nothing about medicine or medical science or how to be a doctor. But nobody else does yet, either!

i'm not sure about the comparative intellectual challenge of law and medical schools - it might depend on the person - but it seems like the latter is generally more of an endurance sport

I get the impression there's more expectation that you're actually going to REMEMBER all the shit you learn in med school - or at least that you should

Early on (at least in our curriculum), there is a lot of like, biochemistry stuff, which we need to know for Step I of the Boards next year, but almost certainly won't need to know as a doctor unless you go into research on that specific thing. The basic pathways have some value, but even the instructors are mostly telling us that knowing the various structural differences of isoprene-derived molecules is not a particularly pressing clinical skill.

Knowing the biochemistry will help you understand some of the later, more relevant stuff. Understanding aids retention. So, presumably, you will have a better chance of recalling the more relevant stuff when you need it.

holy shit i'm tired

C-L: where are you going to school, again?

good luck dudes, are you doing medicine in the us?

i am, y

I go to Ge0rget0wn (I do not know why I feel the need to Googleproof that, but I do). Which is delightful! Especially last Tuesday, since we started Gross Anatomy, and then I got to join the mob at the White House after Obama got elected. It was basically all you could ask out of going to med school in DC.

We just converted to systems-based, and they opted to hold off Gross Anatomy for the first three modules (which were mostly biochemistry and cellular physiology and genetic stuff), but we finally put Genetics behind us and now it is time for Cardiopulmonary and cadavers and such.

I am also basically tired all the time, gbx. But yeah this still rules.

our curriculum is olde-skool, and i wish it wasn't. systems/organs and/or case-based would suit my temperament much better. we're doing biochem, histo, and just started genetics (all three salted with nutrition and a few other seminars now and then). biochem is great, but that's because i think that shit is cool. histo is, uh, a thing. genetics is complicated, but whatever.

good luck with anatomy. it's fascinating, and makes everything more immediate, for lack of a better word.

Oh man Nutrition was a minor scandal for us. It was like 95% self-directed learning, but the guy in charge of the exam kept on saying "Seriously, you don't have to put in that much time, the test is just going to be big concepts, not little details or numbers or anything". We had two other, bigger tests the same week so nobody really put any super-gunning energy behind studying for it. And then the exam had a bunch of questions about details and numbers and everybody did horribly.

Genetics was...not my thing. It was not bad or evil or anything, but there wasn't a lot that really caught my interest. But that is the thing about compressed, dedicated modules; I was a little disinterested for the past month, but now it is done. (The tradeoff is that we've never had longer than two weeks in between tests, which itself is kind of advantageous because all the tests are relatively manageable, and bad because everybody is really smart and the average score keeps on being like 85%.) I got weirdly fond of drawing structures and pathways in prep for med school, so I liked biochem, but signal transduction was probably my favorite.

I was not a science major, at all, so it is sort of funny to see how completely incapable med school is at any sort of non-quantitative assessment. They will find a way to graft a multiple choice exam onto EVERYTHING, no matter how awkward.