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Melissa Palma Melissa Palma (4 Posts)

Contributing Writer

University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

Melissa Palma is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Iowa who recently matched to the Greater Lawrence Family Medicine Residency. When not in the hospital, you can find her studying or reading non-fiction while nursing a taro boba tea.

The Aesculapian Advocate

A column reflecting on the privileges and responsibilities we have as physicians-in-training to advocate for those who do not have the power to do so themselves. Devoted to issues of social justice and health equity, this column hopes to spark conversations and inspire action within each reader's community at large.




Training for Activism, Action and the Future of Medicine

Published by Melissa Palma

During our many years of medical training, we study complex physiological processes running the gamut from acute sepsis to the equally devastating progression of chronic diseases. We spend countless hours in lectures and on the wards, attempting to gain exposure to proper medical management of bread-and-butter medical problems as well as more obscure diseases which may only affect a handful of patients annually. However, most medical schools neglect to teach one crucial area of expertise — training in advocacy skills to address social determinants of health.

Gun Violence in the United States: A Missed Opportunity for Physician Leadership

Published by Hannah Decker

Gun violence is a public health crisis. On your average day in America, 297 people are victims of gun violence. They are shot in murders, assaults, suicide attempts and completions and police interventions. 89 of these victims died — seven of which were children. In the first 90 days of 2016, there have been 57 mass shootings. Your average American is now equally as likely to die via firearms as in a car crash.

Death

Published by Austin Wesevich

I recently finished reading Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, which highlights one man’s journey from the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda to becoming a refugee in New York City. Some chapters are quite graphic in their descriptions of the slaughtering of Hutus and Tutsis — the pain, suffering and atrocities he witnessed. These deaths seemed nothing like being on a morphine drip in an ICU bed or falling into a final deep sleep as your family surrounds you with tears and prayers. Instead they seemed gruesome and inhumane.

China Shop

Published by Kate Bock

Medical students’ place in the hierarchy of medicine means we are routinely restricted in what we can (or should) say. That taboo list includes our own transformation — despite being only one of thousands impacted by medical education, all too often we are left alone to process how it changes us. Review of Systems is a series of down-to-earth slam poems by Kate Bock, putting words to the unspoken process not just of learning medicine, but of becoming a doctor.

After the Autopsy

Published by Diane Brackett

I went through medical school without experiencing the death of a patient I had personally cared for. In contrast to what may be seen on the trauma service, my surgery clerkship was full of routine procedures: appendectomies and cholecystectomies, port placements, excisions of pilonidal cysts, and miscellaneous “ditzels,” as pathologists may refer to them as. Sure, I have had patients who were quite sick and did not have much time left to live. For example, I once performed a neurologic exam on a comatose teenager in the ICU, whose arteriovenous malformation had bled wildly out of control despite prior neurosurgery. But with the constant shuffling of rotations that medical students must endure, I was always in and out of patients’ lives before they had a chance to leave mine.

Student Protests Reveal a Systemic Disease

Published by Tehreem Rehman

As medical students, we recognize that bias in medicine is doubly damaging: it burdens our peers and it harms our patients. In the opening narratives we see both of these at play: in Micaela’s self-doubt and frustration, and in the intern’s judgment of their older, Latina patient. Such clinician bias has been increasingly shown to contribute to widespread health inequities.

Corruption

Published by Austin Wesevich

Shortly before returning to the United States for the holidays from Malawi, a truck full of police and military men pulled up next to my car as I was driving and demanded my driver’s license. They claimed I was “dangerously parked” while stopped in a long queue of traffic to let my friends hop out across from a bus station and would, therefore, be fined K10,000 (approximately $18).

Poker Face: When Patients Are Dealt Terrible Hands (2016)

Published by David Yu

Like poker, medicine has certain rules — patterns of clinical symptoms and lab findings each correlating with a specific spectrum of prognoses that vary in likelihood, the differential diagnosis. Physicians are like seasoned card players, trained to maintain composure and incorporate numerous variables into logical, calculated decisions at what seems like a “dealer’s table” of outcomes. Sometimes, we hedge our bets that the patient will self-resolve, so we elect not to treat; other times, we act conservatively with a battery of tests and pre-emptive therapy.

Widening the Discussion of Mental Health in Medical School and Beyond

Published by Kathleen Tzan

A fellow student writer recently wrote that she wondered if depression were “just part of life as a medical student.” One of her professors had given a lecture on depression asking students to “think of how many people we knew with the signs of depression listed on his lecture slide” — excluding medical students of course, “because you’ve all got some of these.” There is something so terribly and inherently wrong with that statement.

in-Training, the online peer-reviewed publication for medical students in-Training, the online peer-reviewed publication for medical students (13 Posts)

Welcome to in-Training, the online peer-reviewed publication for medical students. Please contact us at editorinchief@in-training.org with any questions or concerns.