nervous for 3rd year/starting clinicals

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Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Clinical medicine is a big jump but you'll be amazed just how quickly it becomes the new normal. It's good that you reckon you're personable and good with patients, because that is the bit that is hard to pick up if you're not already like that; a lot of knowledge is absorbed by osmosis, and the extra stuff you need for exams is really a matter of putting the hours in. It is much better to be this way than having it the other way around.

Reply 21

seaholme

Original post by tpxvs

Im so glad you said nutrition & metabolism was complicated, word around my school was that its easy just very boring. whereas i not only found it boring but actually found it difficult! probably more so than neuro too. (neuro i found to be verrrrryyyyyy vast)

What kind of knowledge do you need to know in clinical?

I found it interesting that you said most people find clinical easier - this is what I have heard from people at uni too, but another commenter further down said people find preclin easier and id be in the majority. i guess ill have to wait and see what i prefer! Can i ask you what makes you say its easier though? is it the actual workload or more free time or more interesting..?

Easy but very boring if you have an eidetic memory or something! I found it almost entirely memorising which for me was a massive pain in the behind. I actually think that's why clinics are easier - it's applied knowledge, constantly being re-inforced and all much more logical. For me pre-clin felt like I was trying to transform myself into a walking compiled textbook. It's more interesting, it sticks with you, it's very satisfying to be able to piece things together like problem solving, talking to the patients is more enjoyable... as for more free time, there's still quite a lot of free time. The amount you have to learn in the first year of clinics is very vast, but it's the kind of thing you actually want to learn. For me clinics felt like doing medicine (at last) rather than playing a particularly brutal memory game. To take your example of neuro as a very vast subject, in practical terms you don't need to know all the nuclei and stuff as a student (I mean it's brilliant if you do, of course) you just need to be able to correlate rough symptoms with rough pathology. UMN vs LMN lesions and all that stuff. It's like 10% of all the stuff you learnt in neuro, and it's the applied stuff.

Clinical medicine is like a whole new set of knowledge in itself, or so I found. Pharmacology will help you from pre-clin and certain physiological, immunological etc. principles, but basically it's a new subject. Bits and pieces you'll recognise, most of it not.

Reply 22

shiggydiggy

Original post by tpxvs

Thanks for the response.

You say preclinical is about building up your foundation of knowledge - how much of this are you expected to recall? i dont think i remember much! i feel like (even with the exams i did do well on) that my memory is very short term, as in I cram over christmas/easter before the exam periods and seem to do alright but within weeks forget the vast majoirty of what i have learnt. do you recommend reading up on some relevant physiology or anything before my first placement?

Thanks it made me feel better that you said all those co-transporters etc are a bit "useless" - I found all that particularly difficult to remember. Could i ask you to give me a few examples of what kind of "top 5 most common" things they ask you about? just to get an idea. Is it like risk factors/medications/diseases..? I have no idea.

Here's a .pdf I've uploaded.

It's basically a 'top 5' of everything. It's golddust when it comes to being grilled on ward rounds.

http://www.filedropper.com/top5medicine

Reply 23

annread

Have you had any teaching in your Year 2 on examinations?
If so, maybe reading over your notes might be helpful ... so in your head you have structure of what the examination should be like. Also reading about common things: basic interpretation of ECG, ABG, etc. But they dont expect you to know much!

A&E is quite a good one to start with as everyone works as a team so I felt involved and not a nuisance. Everyone is on first name terms, even the consultants, which is quite nice so you dont feel like the stupid 3rd year medical student and a little valued!
Tips- just get involved, try see as much as possible, if you feel confident ask whether you can clerk some of the patients (in the minor department- i found this quite helpful). Dont be scared a lot of the minor patients are quite simple cases and once you have watched a couple of clerkings - you will be able to have a go!
Maybe also read over ABCDE as i am sure one the doctors will ask you about it!

Reply 24

Medicine Man

Original post by tpxvs

Thank you for all this! How was clinical easier to revise - what kind of material did you use to revise off? As so far its been the notes iv made from lectures etc throughout that semester. We had semester exams so it was more focused than the exams we will have in clinical where absolutely anything can come up about any system of the body! how are you supposed to know/remember it?

Also, in what way did you prefer clinical years to non clinical?

Everyone has their own way of working so there isn't a correct way or working per se. Having said that, I used third year as a chance to cover all the relevant parts of my first and second year content (cardio/resp physiology, surgical anatomy etc), this time, with a clinical twist. I don't think it was necessary to do all of that, but I did and I found it very helpful as you could always go back to first principles if asked an unfamiliar question (I also intercalated after my second year so had forgotten quite a lot of stuff from pre clin).

For me, it was easier to revise for clinical exams because one day I could pick up a book and literally go, right, let's learn about heart failure, or neck lumps, or anaemia or whatever (usually from the cheese and onion or from youtube videos/lecture podcasts etc.). Third year felt like a year where you just needed to know topics/conditions inside out, so it's easier to pick a condition and work that way. With pre clinical, the lecture slides were very important - students who excelled in exams were often the ones who literally read every single slide on every single lecture and that was because our lecturers set the exams. With clinical years, at least at BL, you do get the module lead giving the odd lecture(s) and there are the odd lecture specific questions from these in the exams, but I found it easier to just learn the topics well for the actual exams using your own material and the appropriate question banks. So yeah, that's why it was "easier" for me to revise. People's opinions will vary, however.

Reply 25

Neostigmine

What I am really starting to worry about is how to know what to learn for exams? Intermediates are at the end of year 3 for me and it seems like they're just saying "everything". :erm: