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.
The continuation and progress of the human condition has been founded on the inheritance of knowledge. With each generation, the lessons learnt are passed on as another valuable brick in the pyramid towards the pinnacle of human success. However, just as progress necessitates the study of the phenomenon in question, the educational system itself has become a topic of scrutiny.
Empathy: it’s what supposedly drives us to become physicians, and what we’re told to demonstrate through our extracurricular activities and during our interviews. We yearn for that perfect patient interaction in which we comforted or understood in a way that changed the patient’s perspective on medical care.
“Chuvash polycythemia,” Sue declares. “That’s going in my 30 percent bucket.” We are studying for our upcoming molecular mechanisms test, as part of the semester-long course intended to introduce us to the basic functions of molecules, cells and tissues. In this integrated curriculum, all the names have changed, and the organization of the material is promised to magically improve our comprehension and recollection of such details.
Figure 1, the Instagram for doctors, aspires to change the way that physicians around the world collaborate. Figure 1 is a free app for sharing medical images. The vast collection of archived images allows health professionals and medical learners to view everything from classic textbook cases of winged scapula to the once-in-a-lifetime cases of harlequin ichthyosis. Dr. Joshua Landy is the chief medical officer of Figure 1. Landy, along with co-founders Greg Levey and Richard Penner, officially launched the app in January 2013.
What I have learned along the way is that many people find policy boring. Maybe they associate it with clips of C-SPAN they watched in middle school civics class, or perhaps it evokes the frustration felt when yet another health policy dies a silent death on a Congressional floor, but whatever the reason, policy is ascribed as a responsibility solely for politicians. This presents a massive conundrum because our interests as future clinicians cannot be represented if we are not the ones speaking to policymakers.
Photography taught me how to see. It taught me to listen using my eyes, rather than my ears alone. This is something that I have carried with me throughout the beginning of medical school. Though some people assume that the arts and the sciences do not mix, photography has actually informed how I envision my work as a physician.
The snow has fully started in Albany. With coldness sprinkling its physical manifestations in flurries, the imminence of winter and another year’s end are tangible. The shuffling students that occupy the classrooms thin as more and more of us choose to study within the warmths of our homes and snuggies. The second year of medical school has truly been a test of endurance and resilience. The two-week themes and examinations have certainly been another challenge to adjust to, many of us exploring and adapting different study strategies in attempt to maximize our time for the ominous Step 1 studying.
Video games, which have been linked to childhood obesity, aggression and poor school performance, are currently being used in the training of surgical residents. Most of the reported effects of video games in the media appear to center upon the alleged negative consequences: video game addiction, increased aggressiveness and various medical and psychosocial effects.
The position of an M0.5 is a very paradoxical one. We’ve gone through five months of class, amazed that our brains can fit in so much material and even more amazed that we have to make room for more. We’ve gotten our white coats and try to ask patients smart questions while having no idea what solution we can provide for the ailments being enumerated. Our goal at this point is not to diagnose — it’s to learn as much information as we can so that somewhere down the long, long line, we’ll be able to utilize what we know and make something of it.
“One of the major problems of rural health is the chronic shortage of health care practitioners in rural, remote and northern areas,” said Dr. Raymond Pong, founder of the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research in Canada.
After introducing myself as a first-year medical student working the attending physician, I went through the medical history with the patient in order to ascertain his chief complaint and history of present illness.
On November 22, several hundred premedical and medical students gathered at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) Training Grounds. It was the second Training Grounds sponsored by AMSA this fall, with the topic of “Leading the Change in the Culture of Medicine.” Although a popular topic being addressed throughout all of medical education, Dr. Jeff Koetje, AMSA’s Education and Research Director, clarified that AMSA Training Grounds is unique. “These conferences provide a safe place for students to learn about these topics away from their home institution,” Dr. Koetje said. “Students can come here and discover that they are not alone.”
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.
