The first week of school
I get so busy with school that I haven't taken the time to write anything.
This first week we had intro to the study of medicine classes, which was basically just giving us hints on how to comport ourselves in medical school and in medicine in general. It wasn't anything that exciting, but I guess it was a nice way to ease us a little into medical school.
Not that it felt like we were eased in because we had our first anatomy lecture on monday, the first dissection on either tuesday or thursday. THey split the class into two groups, A and B. A and B switch off days which we dissect. I dissected for the first time on Thursday, but I got to see the body I would be working on on tuesday since we go in at the end of A groups dissection so that they can show us what they did. We got a male leg amputee. Surprisingly the dissection wasn't as disturbing as I thought it would be. While the lab is a little smelly the ventilation is pretty good so that I never had to leave the room to catch my breath. It really is fascinating looking at all the muscles and ligaments and other structures.
Anatomy is rather stressful because there are so many structures, attachments, innervation and actions to memorize. It is just going to build up on each other, oh well. I'm just trying to stay on top of everything. I need to try not to get too distracted, I think I'll have to try various strategies to find out what works best for me. I had two study groups this weekend. One smaller 3 person group and then the other with 8-9 people. Not sure how productive the 8-9 person group was but did get to review the lectures for tomorrow. We're looking at the posterior neck region and the spinal cord tomorrow.
We also started Osteopathic Principles and Practice (OP&P) in which we are going to learn OMT. On tuesday we learned about perception and palpation. For perception we were handed bags of objects and were told to id them only by touch. For palpation we took turns palpating each others forearms and hands. It was pretty interesting. I think it is going to be a class that I enjoy.
We also had Essentials of Clinical medicine (ECM) on thursday which will be the class that we learn about how to do things like the history and physicals and taking vitals. While this should be interesting and teach us a lot of how to deal with patients, I think this class is going to stress me out because it is about our interpersonal skills. They use standardized patients to simulate situations. The dean called them "out of work actors" though someone pointed out that they are working at the school so you can't really say that they are out of work.
Next week we have anatomy for 4 days and then OP&P, ECM and Physician and Society each for 3-4 hours once a week.
Here are some pictures from my White Coat Ceremony. http://picasaweb.google.com/jyoshi/ConvocationAndWhiteCoatCeremony
Time to review some muscles again and then get to bed.
This first week we had intro to the study of medicine classes, which was basically just giving us hints on how to comport ourselves in medical school and in medicine in general. It wasn't anything that exciting, but I guess it was a nice way to ease us a little into medical school.
Not that it felt like we were eased in because we had our first anatomy lecture on monday, the first dissection on either tuesday or thursday. THey split the class into two groups, A and B. A and B switch off days which we dissect. I dissected for the first time on Thursday, but I got to see the body I would be working on on tuesday since we go in at the end of A groups dissection so that they can show us what they did. We got a male leg amputee. Surprisingly the dissection wasn't as disturbing as I thought it would be. While the lab is a little smelly the ventilation is pretty good so that I never had to leave the room to catch my breath. It really is fascinating looking at all the muscles and ligaments and other structures.
Anatomy is rather stressful because there are so many structures, attachments, innervation and actions to memorize. It is just going to build up on each other, oh well. I'm just trying to stay on top of everything. I need to try not to get too distracted, I think I'll have to try various strategies to find out what works best for me. I had two study groups this weekend. One smaller 3 person group and then the other with 8-9 people. Not sure how productive the 8-9 person group was but did get to review the lectures for tomorrow. We're looking at the posterior neck region and the spinal cord tomorrow.
We also started Osteopathic Principles and Practice (OP&P) in which we are going to learn OMT. On tuesday we learned about perception and palpation. For perception we were handed bags of objects and were told to id them only by touch. For palpation we took turns palpating each others forearms and hands. It was pretty interesting. I think it is going to be a class that I enjoy.
We also had Essentials of Clinical medicine (ECM) on thursday which will be the class that we learn about how to do things like the history and physicals and taking vitals. While this should be interesting and teach us a lot of how to deal with patients, I think this class is going to stress me out because it is about our interpersonal skills. They use standardized patients to simulate situations. The dean called them "out of work actors" though someone pointed out that they are working at the school so you can't really say that they are out of work.
Next week we have anatomy for 4 days and then OP&P, ECM and Physician and Society each for 3-4 hours once a week.
Here are some pictures from my White Coat Ceremony. http://picasaweb.google.com/jyoshi/ConvocationAndWhiteCoatCeremony
Time to review some muscles again and then get to bed.