Medical Student Editor and in-Training Staff Member Emeritus
University of Florida Fixel Movement and Neurorestoration Institute
Nita Chen is a current movement disorders fellow at University of Florida Movement and Neurorestoration program. She is Class of 2017 medical student at Albany Medical College. To become cultural, she spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Now she just holes up in her room to study most of the time.
History and the greater emergence of medical presence in popular media have placed physicians on a pedestal where they command significant power and respect. As healers and scholars who are privy to the secrets of the human body, physicians are often expected to shoulder great responsibilities for their fellow human being while still maintaining their own mental well-being.
“Neuroanatomy lab exam. You’ve got this. You studied hard. You’re good at anatomy, you know that. Okay, found a tag you definitely know. Start at the one you know. You’ll be okay.” It’s the way I try to start every exam. I try to talk myself up to push away all of the negativity slowly flooding my brain. Anxiety is a tough card to be dealt, especially in medical school. There are only so many ways to cope with the mounting pressure.
“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? But where are the snows of yesteryear?” Not many people are experts in medieval French poetry. It’s a tiny corner of academia, filled with people whose passions and imaginations lie a millennium in the past. And so many of those academics, and I do use that term in the most tweed-wearing, bookish, kindly way possible, have their classes relegated to the far corners of campus, to buildings who are themselves of a different century. Or at the very least, of an era before air conditioning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Hello there,” I thought upon meeting my first patient in medical school. I did not get a response. Not that I was expecting one; my first patient was, as are most medical students’ first patients, a cadaver. She was draped with a bed sheet. Even when we began making the first cuts on her back, we kept her covered from the waist down.
My classmates and professors tell me I overthink it. “You overanalyzed the problem.” “Stop mulling it over.” “Just focus on the buzzwords and you’ll rock the exam.” “Jump through the hoops and move on.”
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.
