TSR Med Students' Society Part III

Wonder how they do it?

In Cambridge all the female surgeons seem to have filthy rich husbands so can afford to pay a small army of nannies to look after their children. Aside from this, having a house husband or taking part time training (which still seems to be looked down upon by many senior surgeons) seem the only alternative ways.

I really don't understand the point of this. Barts does it as well, so it's not a UEA diss.

I really don't understand the point of this. Barts does it as well, so it's not a UEA diss.

To me it would make sense that having a decent, broad understanding of the basic sciences covering the whole body is pretty vital for getting the most out of clinical exposure and understanding what's really going on. But then I'm still a baby second year, that opinion may not stand when I start clinics.

I remember going to see a lady early last year with liver disease in a ward once, and later on saw a patient with rheumatoid arthritis but didn't know much about either disease so if they went on about their treatment/symptoms/diagnosis etc (with rheumatoid arthritis especially) I didn't know what the hell they were on about. Yeah I knew vaguely how many units of alcohol is supposed to be the limit and stuff like that but nothing else, which meant whilst it was a good exercise to learn how to take a social history, I got nothing else out of it and that sort of thing isn't too hard to do really.

See we've been taught all this (for rheum+ortho) in this module. I think we maybe seem to have a different course structure compared to most

I liked going on the wards in first year. I hated lectures and wanted to be in the hospital environment. Yeah I was as useful as a chocolate poker but I did get something out of it.

Aye, but our pre-clinical years aren't structured based on disease or areas of medicine etc. We do learn about them, but it's not our main focus. For example, in our most recent module we're doing the GI tract (anatomy/physiology), and a lot of biochemistry. We'll learn about the functions of various parts, for example we'll learn about glucose metabolism, then we do learn briefly about the things that "go wrong", for example, we'll learn about diabetes (treatment, symptoms and why it happens) within the part about glucose metabolism. I think the difference is we have much less of a clinical focus in the first two years, so I would say less of our course is based around disease etc, but more around the science of the body and then when we get to our clinical years we'll look at things clinically (obviously) and say, if we got a case study on a patient with malabsorption for example, we'd link it back to our basis of study, rather than just having learnt the symptoms and treatment itself. So we won't have rheum/ortho module, but they'll come under different, less clinically based headings.

I don't know if I'm making sense but I think that's the main difference. We're so lecture-focused I don't think we'd have time to go on wards.

In other news - unless it was one of you guys, a nursie negged me. I'm tempted to subscribe just to get her back :O

Don't give into the internet rage.

But I went over there to give a nice opinion due to Wangers invitation, and they neg me?
How dare they...


How VERY dare they

Back to acupuncture for a sec... (I don't know if this was one of the papers talked about earlier)

New mega-systematic review out for acu and pain. It was a systematic review of 57 other systematic reviews, lol. Basically, it's not very good for pain, and it's not harmless. Lots of conflicting results in the weaker studies, lots of negatives in the rigorous studies. Surprise.

Also, it is impossible to do double-blinded placebo controls, so that's an issue, and is sufficient in some cases to explain some of the weak positives.

Several cases of site infections, a few pneumothoraces, and 5 deaths. All from something that is no better than placebo.