Feeling More Physiciany

One more post for the night. Since our genetics class also finished last month, we have now begun physiology! This is the class I've been most excited for during the 1st year and so far it's just as great as I'd hoped. We spent the first few weeks discussing the basics, but now we're in the middle of cardiovascular physiology.

This last Wednesday was the most enjoyable day of med school for most of the students. It was possibly the most interesting and integrated learning experience we've had. In the morning, our physiology lectures were on heart sounds and murmurs. We put on fake stethoscope headsets that replicated different heart sounds and we learned what they meant. It was much more intense than I expected. There is so much that a skilled physician could tell about a heart just by listening to it. It blows my mind.

Then that afternoon, we met with "standardized patients" - people payed to behave like patients so we can test out our clinical skills! So we spent the afternoon palpating, percussing and auscultating a person's heart! We got to immediately use the knowledge we'd gained that morning. It was a great experience. It was also a great feeling to finally understand that essential tool, the stethoscope. It's a good feeling to have the basic techniques down. There are still many nuances of the heart that will take some time for me to be able to hear, but that's why I have 3 1/2 more years of medical school, right?

First Sign of Learning!

As of this week, anatomy is officially over for me! It's both exciting and maybe a little sad... well, no, it's really just exciting to be done that small milestone of medical school. I almost feel like I need to change the name of the blog now!

Thanks to my great anatomy professors, I've finally experienced my first indication that I'm learning. Thank goodness.

On the train I see all kinds of people, and riding the train home after our anatomy midterm I noticed a lady with standing by the door with a drooping on one side of her face. I then noticed her hand on that side of her body was held like this:

It was the Claw Hand sign! It can be a sign of damage to the lower roots of the brachial plexus, mentioned earlier in the post about the mighty arm pit! It was a great day and a good reminder that I'm actually learning useful information seen in everyday life.

Manichaeism in Med School

Once again, interesting ideas from my high school English class resurface in my life. Mr. Juan Christian, the teacher I learned by far the most from in high school, talked about how Western cultures often view life with a Manichaeist perspective.


Manichaeism: A dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles 


Good ol' Mr. Christian described this in contrast to Eastern philosophy of Yin and Yang, that define good as balance between two opposing sides.


Manichaeism struck in our biochemistry class (and a little in physiology)! Teachers and students alike, when teaching or trying to understand biochemical processes, tend to label molecules, organs and the like as: 

good 

or

EVIL

This method of learning just failed miserably! The labels failed because in some situations the villains were the good guys! When we learned about the liver, for example, a professor speaking on one disease would describe the liver as greedy and taking all of the fat, when the next day another professor disease of the day was described it as a protector. As students, when we were learning cancer biology, did the exact same thing with different proteins, only to confuse ourselves more by creating these labels. In reality, nothing was good or evil, it just was imbalanced or improperly used.

I think that this applies to so many things in life. Few things can be given such dichotomous labels. More often something we consider evil is something good when balanced or in the right context. Perhaps even viewing death as the villain of life is not the best perspective either.