Medical Student Editor
University of Washington School of Medicine
Eric serves as a medical student editor at in-Training and he attends the University of Washington - Class of 2017. In the past he has worked in EMS and international community health. As for the future, a career caring for the community is in the works. He believes writing is an essential expression of human ideas, passion and intelligence. Eric is a husband and father of three.
Physicians in-training are granted a privilege unparalleled in society. Human beings generously donate their bodies for our learning. They lay naked, exposed on cold stainless steel tables while strangers, who will never know their name, study them intimately. Like a grandfather telling stories to the next generation, their organs reveal to us a story of life.
A few weeks ago, I was unhinging my jaw to swallow the proverbial firehose of information that is musculoskeletal medicine. At some stage between prying my mouth open and forcibly dislocating my temporomandibular joint (really the highest-yield medical procedure for medical students in the information age … I highly recommend it if you want to have at least a fighting chance at Step 1), the following scenario blossomed into my mind: A medical student from 1910 time travels to the present day to document out how medical training has changed, and he quickly takes note of a few other things.
Such was the start of clerkship, lost in a sea of paperwork and bureaucracy. A mountain of bookkeeping distributed to each student: due dates, boxes to check, requirements to fulfill and all with the threat of expulsion if any part was deemed incomplete. I understand the need to track what we experience for assessment, but the framing and focus of this introduction emphasized what should be a secondary to our learning.
Medical students take on a massive amount of responsibility beginning the first day of school. From passing pre-clinical tests, to perfecting the physical exam, to performing well on Step 1, we hold ourselves accountable for a high level of academic achievement to ensure successful transitions into the clinical years and residency.
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.
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.
As medical students, we have the unique experience of jumping from service to service or specialty to specialty. The good students will embrace the opportunity to be constantly challenged to evolve in their thinking and their doing. However, often times, the experience of one week here, two weeks there, four weeks somewhere else can be a bit awkward.
This story revolves around a single piece of paper. Among those who use this piece of paper, and among those who benefit from it, there exists much confusion about the paper’s intention. Some of the providers suspect intentional misguidance by those who designed the form.
Today, a person’s zip code is a better indication of their health than their genetic code is. We know that physical communities experience shared sickness, whether linked to trauma, viruses or unavailable nutrition, and there are established biomedical consequences to poverty and segregation. Acknowledging these links, however, only gets us so far; successful intervention demands thinking deeply about the relationship between patients and their communities. Rochester, NY is home to an innovative attempt to combating these issues. It is one that challenges traditional ideas of what factors define health and consequently, what metrics define therapy.
Vanilla Ice famously once said “Stop, Collaborate and Listen” in his 1989 song “Ice Ice Baby.” To the same token, we all can agree that we do not do enough of collaborating and listening when it comes to the issue of health care reform: it is a complex topic with no easy fix and one which has become divided on party lines.
One of my friends told me today that she shadowed in the emergency room on Friday night. She told me they had a patient who was pronounced dead on arrival after being shot 24 times. Unfortunately, this is a typical narrative for our emergency room on a Friday night. I wish I was surprised, I wish I didn’t already know the story, and I wish the news of another young life prematurely and senselessly erased from this earth even made the news.
Contributing Writer
Temple University School of Medicine
Philadelphia medical student tying to navigate the narrow straits between biomedical science and the humanities.
