Columnist and in-Training Staff Member
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Hi! My name is Krutika Parasar and I started this blog as a medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson. I have lived in New Jersey all my life, except for my undergraduate years at Brown University. I love exercise and sports, singing and playing the piano, and spending time with my family and friends.
Exercise as the Best Medicine
The further I progress in my medical training, the more passionately I believe that exercise is the best preventive medicine. In this column, I share research regarding exercise as medicine, ways medical students can incorporate exercise into their daily routines, poetry on positive exercise experiences, and highlights on how doctors in the community are using exercise as a means to treat their patients.
So now that we have discussed the many benefits of exercise, how much is recommended? National organizations such as the American Heart Association (AHA) have created evidence-based guidelines describing the minimum amounts and types of physical in which adults should regularly engage.
Is it worth a medical student’s precious time to be tweeting? Don’t we waste enough time on Facebook and Instagram? Is it just another platform where we can get criticized for lack of professionalism? All of these are important questions to be asking. I learned over time that Twitter could be used as a powerful tool for the eager medical student, if used correctly.
“Puedo tomar su presión? Puedo tomar su pulso?” I butchered in Spanish, over and over again. Sometimes I received a smile and laugh in return, sometimes a look of confusion, sometimes a placid unfolding of the patient’s arm. I pumped the cuff up repeatedly and listened intently over the screams of playing children and the chatting of a long line of patients.
The traditional structure of medical education begins with teaching normal anatomy and physiology followed by the various pathologies and treatments. Once students reach the clinical years, we are taught to think in the form of a SOAP note. First, perform a history and physical; then, order the necessary diagnostic tests to obtain your subjective and objective information. Next, form your assessment and plan — what is the problem, and how do you fix it?
Melissa Palma, a recent fourth-year matcher out of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, IA, graces us with her expert advice on succeeding in medical school and beyond.
Good sleep goes hand in hand with good health; after all, one-third of the day is spent in the state of non-wakefulness know as sleep. Whether this sleep is a peaceful slumber or ridden with multiple awakenings has great consequences for productivity, learning, attention and demeanor throughout the day. Thus, it is essential to maintain adequate sleep hygiene, and exercise can play a role in increasing restorative sleep — if done at the right time.
Whether you’re a first-year trying to survive the last few hours, days or weeks of school, or you’re a seasoned third-year ready to start applying for residency programs, a crucial piece of legislation was just brought to Congress and it’s time to talk about it. As you may know, funding for residency programs has remained virtually stagnant since 1997. While the funding has remained consistent, enrollment in medical schools has increased nearly 30% since 2002. How have we accommodated the increased number of entering medical students in residency training programs?
Maybe it was excitement that I was partaking in something greater than myself. Maybe it was guilt that I had not been closely following the nationwide outrage and responses to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. But other than my dreaded neurology shelf exam that Friday, the White Coats for Black Lives Die-In was the most exciting thing on my calendar all week.
My inspiration for this piece stemmed from my experience working on the pulmonology service during my internal medicine rotation. I was moved by the vitality of our bodies and the organs that allow us to function. The lungs are one of the few organs that directly associate with the outside environment. Everything we breathe becomes part of our body, and as much as our body and respiratory epithelium can filter the air we breathe, it is not a perfect system. As a result, we breathe the world around us.
On my left, the ragged, meaty stump of a severed neck stands upright like an abandoned signpost. A classmate examines it carefully. She is petite. She stands on a stool to obtain a better angle for observation. She cranes her neck, twisting the very muscles she is studying back and forth, back and forth.
Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’ said, “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The role of nutrition in health has been recognized since the beginning of medicine, yet somehow nutrition education has fallen by the wayside in most medical curricula. Given that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and obesity has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer, nutrition should be a focal point of medical education.
Everyone / in this cold / room is dead.
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.
