The Most Important Thing I didn’t learn in Med School
By Jessica Jou Mrs. B was washing dishes in the kitchen when she heard a thump where her twelve-month-old son was asleep. She ran to him and found her son had fallen from a chair (code: e884.2). He was crying (code: 780.92) and visibly shaken, but did not have overt signs of bleeding, bruising, or trauma. She picked him up and immediately brought him to the emergency room. There, he was triaged by the nurse (nursing report #1) and vitals were taken (nursing report #2). Shortly after the mother and son pair settled into the pediatric emergency room, he vomited once (code 787.03). The emergency...
Read MoreSurgery at $147 per minute
Nate Johnson is a medical student at Tufts University and Maine Medical Center. The patient had a large abscess surrounding his spleen. On a large screen in the middle of the operating room, I watched a surgeon drain the fluid collection and remove the organ with small metal tools. I remember the surgeon navigating the complex anatomy with alacrity, handling the laparoscopic equipment with expert finesse, and quickly and confidently answering the battery of questions from the assisting medical student. To a young and reverent observer, this surgeon seemed to know everything. So at the end of...
Read MoreMedical Students Write Handbook for their Peers
Elisabeth Askin is a third year medical student at Washington University in St Louis and co-author of The Health Care Handbook for medical students. In 2008, I volunteered at the San Francisco General Hospital Emergency Room, enrolling patients in research studies. One study correlated clinical signs in trauma patients with positive findings on chest x-rays, so that orders could be better informed and more efficient. And efficiency was certainly needed – I was stunned to learn that only 3% of trauma chest x-rays yield positive results. That’s a lot of time, money, and energy for very...
Read MoreThe New Generation of Medical Students
The following post is from Ioana Baiu, a joint degree candidate in medicine and public health at Harvard We are a new generation of physicians and physicians in training. The words “stem cell therapy”, “Robertsonian translocation” and “artificial tracheal transplant” were part of our vocabulary from the first day of medical school. At the astounding speed at which scientific advancements are made, our ability to incorporate new material is in a constant state of change. Slowly, the heavy textbooks became relics, as we migrated towards a mobile knowledge, a way for us to...
Read MoreSkipping the Daily Blood Draw
The following anecdote is from Ioana Baiu, a joint degree candidate in medicine and public health at Harvard University. One of the most memorable discussions regarding the cost of care was at 4:45 AM during surgical morning rounds. As usual, the interns would present the overnight events of their patients to the chief resident and a plan for the day would be agreed upon. These morning rounds were particularly intense: in addition to the 30 patients that an intern had to manage solo over night, the brutal hours that the surgical oncology service demanded, our chief resident, Dr. W.,...
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