Contributing Writer
Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University
Victor is a Class of 2016 medical student at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University.
Sleeping on the Job
There are very few settings in which a good night’s rest is more important than in medicine. It is vital for patients’ in recovery as well as for those entrusted with their care. Here’s some advice from a fellow medical student on ways to enhance sleep for patients and in each phase of medical training.
For medical students, long hours hitting the books, demanding schedules and competitive careers can all make it hard to turn off at night. As a result, we tend to experience sleepless nights; and for some, these nights turn into weeks, months or even years.
Medicine. It is a word that many individuals are passionate about. It is a word that has endured many changes throughout the years of its existence. For the two of us, the word medicine holds a special meaning as it has been shaped and colored by our time as medical students overseas in the Caribbean.
“He always does this, it’s unbelievable!” My preceptor’s voice was unmistakable. We had just finished our first case and I had momentarily left to get some coffee. “This is getting unacceptable, someone needs to bring this up to the board!” I had never seen him so worked up after having worked with him over the course of the week.
When my classmates ask me to recommend poems for reading, I am always thrilled to share my favorite poems. After sharing, I sometimes ask myself the following questions: What am I recommending exactly? How can reading poetry benefit my classmates? How has reading poetry helped me, if it even has? These are important questions to think about, particularly when thinking about how to prioritize reading poetry alongside other activities; this would not be unlike using triage to assign priority for treatments.
More and more doctors are hailing exercise as both preventive and therapeutic medicine, targeting a multitude of symptoms and diseases. In fact, The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has launched efforts to teach physicians to prescribe exercise to all of their patients as a routine part of their visit. What are some reasons that exercise the best medicine?
Challah bread is traditionally prepared for Jewish holidays and the Sabbath. We made ours on a Wednesday night. Helen and Marie stare warily from their wheelchairs as a dozen medical students file into the retirement home lounge, toting tubs of flour and challah dough. “We’re not playing bingo?” Helen asks, looking disappointed, as students and octogenarians begin matching up for the evening.
It was a tough week for many of us. Scary events in the news. As phrased so eloquently by a fellow writer here, community injustice is intimately related to patient care. On my psychiatry rotation, I regularly hear about unbelievable violence that stems from and leads people into substance abuse, mental illness and crises resulting in hospitalization. I ended the week feeling sorry for our country and socially isolated from my peers.
“Which one of you idiots gave my patient a homosexual dose of diuretic?” Unbelievably, this is what the senior surgeon “growled” at Dr. Pauline Chen and her cohort during surgery training, according to her article in The New York Times entitled “Does Medicine Discourage Gay Doctors?”
Step 1 studying can be a lonely endeavor. This is true even if you have a study buddy — you may share a table at the local café, but you might as well be sitting in two different worlds. One of you reviews cardiac physiology while the other watches a renal pathology lecture. Your worlds may convene occasionally as one of you quizzes the other on neurocutaneous syndromes or shares an interesting tidbit from a question bank …
I worked my last shift in the emergency department as a medical student last week. A few hours in, I walked to the chart rack and grabbed the next patient to be seen. I walked into the room in question and introduced myself in that fluid, simple way I’d perfected over thousands of encounters over the previous few years. “Hi, I’m Sarab Sodhi, the fourth-year med student on the team. What brings you in to see us?” …
Now that I have finished my PhD and moved on to the rest of my medical training, the last few months have been an interesting change of pace. Since I took first-year medical school classes piecemeal while spending the majority of my time working on my doctoral research, being a full-time medical student now is a new experience (and a culture shock in some ways) for me! I’ve had to reevaluate the utility of my …
As medical students, we are handed many books and are told to read them — and memorize them, usually. In addition to the technical, fact-filled and scientific books we are given, medical students would probably benefit from being handed a self-help book or two. It is interesting that medical students, a group intent on making our lives about caring for others, so often fail to care for ourselves. The difficulty with medical students is that …
Medical Student Editor, Writer-in-Training and Columnist Emeritus
Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University
Brent Schnipke is a third year medical student at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton, OH. He is a 2014 graduate of Mount Vernon Nazarene University with a degree in Biology. His professional interests include writing, medical humanities, and higher education. When he's not studying, he can be found reading at a local coffee shop, training for his next race, or planning an adventure with his wife. Brent is also active on social media and can be reached on Twitter and Instagram @brentschnipke.
Prints, Pages, and Pagers
Prints, Pages, and Pagers aims to look closely at the lives of medical students and doctors, real or fiction, whose lives and experiences are told in novels, short stories, poetry, or any kind of writing. These book reviews are an opportunity for medical students to learn from the many fascinating stories produced by the field of medicine, and maybe to read something other than a textbook.
