Medical Student Editor
University of Central Florida College of Medicine
Romela is a Class of 2017 medical student at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. She was born in Yerevan, Armenia and grew up in Russia until the age of 15 at which point she immigrated to the United States. She is quadrilingual and has completed her undergraduate education at the University of California, Irvine with Honors in Biological Sciences. Romela has extensive experience in clinical research, medical education development, and community service. In her free time, she enjoys cross-fit, long-distance running, painting, and choreographing. She has completed her first 26.2 mile marathon in DisneyWorld in 2016.
One of the visions of in-Training has been to raise awareness of the significant issues affecting medical students across the United States and internationally. Yet, when we focus solely on our needs, we often fail to see and appreciate the patient perspective.
Medical school does a great job of teaching students about anatomy, biochemistry, differential diagnoses, diseases, medications, lab tests and imaging studies. Although science is a critical and indispensable part of being a doctor, understanding patients as unique individuals can be crucial to providing the best care. Knowing a patient’s story and being able to empathize can improve patient outcomes and adherence. While it is more difficult to quantify the effect of empathy than the effect …
Perhaps you watched the Oscars last month. Maybe you rooted for the technically stunning “Gravity,” or the raw, true-to-life “Twelve Years a Slave,” or since we’re science-inclined medical nerds, “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” the film based (loosely) on an HIV-positive patient’s real-life plight to medication access during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. I freelance as a production assistant and set medic. One film I worked on was up for Best Picture, so I dutifully watched, …
This winter, take time to relax with family and friends. For first years, you’re ready to breathe after a slew of examinations. For second years, you have Step 1 on your mind but aren’t fully committed to studying—unless you’re a gunner. For third years, you’re exhausted from the wards and it’s time for a break. For fourth years, you’re interviewing around the country and you can’t wait to sleep in your own bed for a …
We’re all familiar with those epidemiology pie charts that preface most of our pathology lectures. They’re the slides that everyone tunes out and gleefully skip over when reviewing for the exam, minus the few pertinent buzzwords: risk factors, mean age, gender and common symptoms. After all, “think horses, not zebras” is one of the most famous adages in medicine and rightfully so, because biology operates on efficient systems in very logical patterns. Do the body …
My latest obsession is “Doc Martin,” which is a British series taking place in a fictional sleepy seaside town in England called Portwenn. The main character is grumpy Dr. Martin Ellingham (played by Martin Clunes), but is known to his disdain as Doc Martin by the villagers. Paradoxically, Martin was a surgeon working in London but had to relocate to the quiet town for one reason: his phobia to blood. Unfortunately, it developed during his …
Imagine having a shiny ice pick pushed into your eye and up into your brain, waved around for a couple of minutes, and then taken out. This is exactly what happened to the patients of Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who led one of the darkest periods in the history of psychiatry in our country. In the early 1930s, Dr. Freeman thought that he was destined to do great things in medicine. As the grandson …
Author’s note: Mild spoilers ensue. “Call the doc.” Jeff Daniels, as a crime boss named Abe, utters the only explicit reference to a health care professional in director Rian Johnson’s film Looper, in which medicine plays a tiny but indelibly disgusting role. For the central conceit, criminal organizations in the future send captives back in time where hitmen called “loopers” shoot and kill them. The loopers live in a time period where there is no …
Contributing Writer Emeritus
University of Alabama School of Medicine
Patrick is a Class of 2014 medical student at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham. Born and raised in California, he attended the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana and then spent two years applying his English major by teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth graders literature, grammar, and writing for the university's ACE program in Mobile, Alabama. Current extracurricular interests include trying to resume reading and writing as hobbies, watching films, listening to music and collecting film soundtracks, relaxing with friends, and waiting, with diminishing patience, for the Cal Golden Bears football team to have an undefeated season. He remains undecided about a potential field of practice.
