Well what can I say. A year has passed without an update, and I’m sure any readers I had will by now be long gone.
The problem based learning is still problematic and medical school is still the nightmare it always was, so why continue?
Because I’m a fool who believes it will all be different when I qualify. Simplistic isn’t it!
Recently I’ve been ashamed to be a medical student. Issues arising over at Dr Rant have made me question just how professional so called medical professionals are.
Sure, we’re all entitled to our own opinions, and rightly so that we should share them. But christ almighty, keep them constructive.
Reverting to poo slinging and swearing at people isn’t very mature is it? Sometimes it would just be nice to distance myself from arguments like this. Hence why I’ve refrained from commenting on the original post.
Rest assured, I am still here, just very very busy.
OK, I’m still lurking around in the background. It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, mainly due to the pressure of uni based work.
But fear not, Dr Placebo is back, trying to help you out with little or no evidence base
Something odd happened this week. Something that I never considered before now.
…I worried that I was taking advantage of a patient.
Not in a seedy way or anything illegal you understand…. I just felt that I was taking advantage of a patient’s illness to gain personal clinical experience.
Am I right to feel guilty? Is this a common experience, or is this a sign of weakness?
Apologies for the lack of posting of late, but I’ve been experiencing the inside of my bed for the last week through being ill. Nothing too serious – but enough to keep me from my placement on the children’s ward (didn’t want to give my ick to the little darlings).
I would like to add a big thankyou to Dr Crippen for linking to me last week on the Britmeds – it was indeed an honour!
I promise I intend to return fully this week after I start back on placement feeling better!
Why is it that wherever you stand in clinic/ward/out patients or surgery (even if scrubbed in) you’re always in the way?
Is this just a medical student thing, as everyone else seems to know exactly where they need to be and what they need to be doing, while even if a medical student puts their back to a wall, someone will want something from behind them.
Please tell me this isn’t just me?
I seem to have developed this fancy footwork, which I shall name the Med Student Shuffle. Med Student Shuffle involves rapidly changing location/position any time a member of any medical/surgical team walks in your direction, just in case you’re in their way.
If only this were a suitable skill for MTAS – I’d be made!
The OSCE results are out soon, and there’s much trepidation in my class.
The actual exam was rather funny in hindsight. Someone in my year getting knocked into by another student leaving a curtained area without looking, and the first student swearing rather loudly as the Dean appeared to invite him into his next station. Bonus marks for that one!
I managed to snap a latex glove putting it on for the station, and ended up with the giggles. This may have limited my time in the station but I still managed to finish.
OSCEs are the scariest thing I’ve done, yet oddly the most enjoyable. It’s more how you perform as a person than brain power, and it’s a relaxing sort of exam compared to a written paper.
Following on from this post by the Little Medic I thought I’d expand somewhat on those thoughts.
It seems to not only be my medical school that has the brown-nosing student problem, and another blogging medic has also identified it.
Medicine as a University course breeds competitiveness into people. I’m wondering if that’s necessarily a good thing.
Do we really desire doctors who are prepared to be underhand and sneaky to get what they want? And is this a trend that should be encouraged in medical school….
My school is terrible for it; you hear wonderful rumours of students and the air ambulances for example. Something I would give a leg for (although it may somewhat limit my career plans!). I do sometimes wonder how these contacts and networks come across, and whether medical school is still as ‘old boy’s network’ as it always used to be?
I wonder if there’s an old girl’s network too…
Anyone who has ever been to university will recognise the following correlation:
The closer you get to exams, the more people will emerge for revision sessions.
I’m not saying this to be deliberately facetious, merely stating a fact.
For all I’ve been here a while now, I still don’t know every person in my year….what I would pride myself on are my observational skills. I look around when I’m sat in lectures, I recognise faces and their friends.
Impressively at the revision sessions for our last OSCE there must have been a good 30+ people in the room that I had never seen before in my life.
If I’m honest, I find it alarming. OSCEs are designed to challenge the individual, and cannot be revised for from a book or the internet.
And to think….we’re training doctors here.
As previously mentioned, evidence based medicine is the standard core teaching at a modern medical school.
Many of us are still questioning what the hell this means. Maybe I’m thick, maybe it’s advising against rubbing mustard on your chest for a cold…..pass.
Maybe it means this. Oddly enough my medical education to date has covered ‘complementary/alternative’ medicine….yet never came to a conclusion.
What do you think?
