Two tests down, one to go – Some thoughts on Medical School

I had two tests today in medical school, and have one more on Monday, wrapping up the Anatomy block.  It has been very interesting material, but at the same time I am ready to move on to something else.  Part of that may be that I don’t think the level of detail we are learning is necessary, at least not for my chosen career path.

Don’t get me wrong, a knowledge of anatomy is very important for any doctor of medicine.  I just think that it is more important for surgeons than it is for oncologists (my goal).  When will I ever need to be able to find a cranial nerve in a patient, especially when you have to remove the brain to do so?  Actually, bad example, because they could have a brain tumor and I’d have to look at MRIs and understand where it is and what nerves it might affect.

Maybe it’s not the material that I’m learning that bothers me, but more the way it has been taught.  Dissection hasn’t grossed me out, but it is kind of unsettling still sometimes (I had to saw through a human face this week!) and potentially a bit outdated.  The digital media and technology of today make it very easy to learn without having to have each student physically dissect each structure on a cadaver.  We spend hours unskillfully dissecting, waiting for a professor to come by and help us do it right.  By the time we do finish the dissection I’m always tired and feeling gross, and I don’t either have the time or the desire to then spend much time learning and memorizing the things we dissected.  What not just have a couple of prosections (pre-dissected cadavers) for us to look at and rely more heavily on models and digital resources?

I have two major theories.  The first is the nature of historical medicine.  This is the way medical school has been done for a long time, it’s the way our professors learned and how they’ve always taught.  A historical doctor also had to have a very good knowledge of everything, from muscles and nerves to infectious diseases.  While this has a lot of merit, medicine is very different today.  Almost all doctors end up specializing in a very small part of medicine to the exclusion of nearly everything else, with PAs and RNs doing the more general things.  After medical school, I may never hold a scalpel again, and I certainly won’t hold a brain in my hands.

My second idea is that, along with basic anatomy, our professors are trying to teach us something else.  Maybe dissection is important for us to get over our fear of the human body, to prepare us for the gross side of medicine (bed pans and catheters, anyone?).  Maybe by putting us in an uncomfortable situation and using the group pressure of having to do the dissection (without peer pressure a lot of students probably wouldn’t want to dissect) helps us create a Doctor persona, a clinical attitude, that will be very important later in our careers when we need to emotionally distance ourselves from the work we are doing.

Dang it, I’m convincing myself of the opposite point I started out with.  Doing the dissection does indeed have a lot of merit.  And there are definitely some students in my class who really enjoy it and find it fascinating and will probably make excellent surgeons someday. Maybe medical schools could have some way of offering different coursework for  students interested in different branches of medicine.  Like have a surgery track or an internal medicine track.  I guess they already do that via the residency, but maybe that could become included even in the first years of medical school.

Anyways, I’m rambling now.  Let me know what you think (especially anyone involved in medicine themselves), and check out the comics and the next chunk of the story in novel form.