Med Diaries (2nd Yr Med School GYG)

Welcome to Grow Your Grades! A medicine degree sounds like hard work but very interesting. What's been your favourite part so far?

Thx for the welcome

I've really loved the comradery between the medics, everyone is really open to helping each other, which is really nice

Also the topics are genuinely really interesting. Like with the vision stuff I've been going over recently, it all still seems a bit magical how we are able to go from single electrical impulses, to seeing the world in all its beauty. It is really fascinating. And then like adding ontop of that the amount of memory that goes into vision, like actually recognising the face once you've seen it and stuff, is just soo cool imo.

(Slight recency bias haha, but as you can tell I'm really enjoying neuro. I'm enjoying the other parts as well, all the topics this year have been lots of fun so far, although I've been finding immunology really difficult to get my head around)

And its always fun having slightly wacky (sometimes a lil gorey :0 ) stories to tell friends about anecdotes and stuff that came up in lectures - that time they accidentally revived a "witch" after hanging them by stamping on their chest. That is effectively CPR after all...

I can imagine how fascinating all that stuff is to study, especially how it starts - seeing how a fetus' nerves develop is amazing, how the neural tube starts off and discs where the eyes will be etc.

The history of medicine is super interesting too (I'm more of a history person). I love the witch story! And the weird beliefs people had in the past but you can kinda understand how they got there.

Yess, embryology is definitely incredibly fascinating (although it can be quite hard to visualise sometimes because it's such a 3D thing). Yea seeing the neural tube start off, and especially a bit later on how literally every individual neurone finds it specific little 'postcode' in the correct cortical layer is quite remarkable. Literally the slightest thing can go wrong and it would have devastating consequences. There's loads of other whacky stuff in embryology too - did you know, your heart starts off above your brain? 😯

Medical history is definitely really interesting, and not even necessarily really old stuff (although that is interesting too). Sometimes you forget how new a lot of these discoveries are - our pathology professor was telling us much of the field is younger than she is! And, putting things in context of the world wars is fascinating sometimes - e.g. Tsuneko and Reiji Okazaki, the couple who discovered Okazaki fragments (an important part of how DNA replication happens). Reiji (husband) died from leukemia at 44, from the radiation he had suffered in the Hiroshima bombing, with his wife finishing off research. It is quite likely he would have won the Nobel Prize, had he lived long enough for the impact of their research to be realised (although unfortunately, his wife, an equal partner in the research, didn't receive it either).

On the flip-side, our uni has been supposedly teaching medicine since around the time the Aztec empire was starting off, so you can only imagine the sort of things that must have been taught then 🤔

I think knowing what people used to believe and why they believed it is good though, it sort of keeps us humble. Like we're doing the same now as they did then, forming conclusions based on available evidence. I think it's good not to get carried away thinking we as humanity know everything!