Third Year Medical School Student (MS 3)

So, now I'm a third year medical student. Wow time has passed by. I've already taken the USMLE 1, passed it with flying colors, I did so well  Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and every other hospital in America is already asking me to come to their hospitals for residency! Outside, of the obvious(at least I hope it was obvious) fact that I personally haven't taken the USMLE 1, today I got to spend the day with other MS3 students going on rotations-- well actually one.

Before I discuss my day, let me explain MS3 more.Unlike MS1 and MS2, your rotations are not the same as every student. What happens is that each student does have to complete rotations in pediatrics, internal medicine, emergency, family medicine, OB-GYN, surgery, etc. However, the order of when the rotations are done as well as what hospital and/or clinic that the rotations take place, is not the same. Also, unlike MS1 and MS2, NO DAILY LECTURES!!! MS3 is the year of getting your hands dirty and starting to learn how to do what the doctors do. Once a week a group of students working in the same center meet together to listen to a lecture given by a physician abouthealth information related to the area of medicine that a student is rotating.

However here are the cons of this new set-up:
--After every rotation there is an exam over it
--No summer vacation (the rotations are all year)
--multiple lectures are crammed into the weekly "lecture day"
--Afterward you have to take USMLE2 CS (recommendated by Fall of Senior year)

 

This is one of the Sports Medicine Doctors

 (sorry I forget his name) demonostrating on a MS3
 how to do  a wrist wrap so that it properly supports
 the wrist. It's actually a bit more complex than it looks
 because there are two bones and not one in the
 lower arm (ulna and radius).

  

But, instead of looking at the negative, let's get back to the positive aspects of MS3. The weekly lectures for the Family Medicine rotation was held in one of their lecture rooms. The morning lectures were over medications used to control both HDL and LDL cholesterol levels and Upper Respiratory Infections (UPI). After the lecture we got learn more about one of the areas of Family Practice, Sports Medicine. I was a student athletic trainer in high school so I was familiar with some of the terminology and techniques. For our project, we (really the four MS3s that I was shadowing) had to learn how to make a cast and do a wrist wrap. I got to be a model for one of the MS3 (yah me?!).



During the lunch lecture, we saw a lecture given by Dr.Jerry Fletcher, a child psychiatrist, on the autism spectrum (this lunch lecture was actually nice). We got to observe a mother who had five children with psychological disorders, which four of the five children were diagnosed with autism. The other child was diagnosed with anxiety disorder. What was even more amazing was the fact that each case of autism was completely different and truly was on a spectrum. One child had a less severe form of autism called Asperger's another one had combination of Autism and bi-polar disorder and at a time had to put in a child institution before they were able to find the right medications that helped her temperment.

I'm very interested in autism so I am interested in going on and on, on what happened during the lunch lecture but I won't since this blog is about MS3.  But I will say that one of the main topics during this lecture was better understanding how doctors, who don't know or understand much on autism, can help parents(who also don't understand  what's going on with their children) can help both the patients and the patients' parents. Last semester I studied the current doctor/parent conflict emerging around autism due to lack of effective communication between the two groups so listening in on this lecture was a treat for me.

Anyway, NOW I'm getting back to MS3. After lunch we had three afternoon lectures. One was on Pap Smears (thankfully I didn't have to take part in), the other on osteoporosis, and the last was on colonoscopies. The last lecture was cool because we got to practice doing colonoscopies with a colonoscope. The colonoscope looks like a combinatin of a fishing pole and remote control and was really cool. Class ended at around 4pm and we were able to leave afterwards.

This Family Medicine Doctor (I forget his name too) is demonstrating how to do a colonoscopy.
 We used a colon model (they wouldn't let us use people, dang it.) and the screen to do a colonoscopy.
The model even had polps in them to practice the procedure for extracting them from to colon for further
 biospy (polps like lumps on breast, can be precursors to cancer). What the doctor is holding in his hands
 is the colonoscope. Yes, it was as fun to mess with it as it looks.



Summary MS3

In all honesty, for me to give my summary of MS3 after one day wouldn't give you the best idea of what MS3 is like. So I talked to the MS3 students that I was with and I got a lot of responses from them so, don't take my word about MS3, read theirs.


"In year 3 you learn how much you don't know"


"Year 3 is a Year of humility"


"You learn during your rotations that if you anger the sugeon or doctor, it doesn't matter because you are not the first person you've upset nor is he going to remember you"


" ...Not all residents are bad. What it is, is that residents at times are not the nicest at helping MS3 because they are in their residency trying to prove themselves and learn and here you are, a MS3 who won't be around in a month and is distracting them from what they have to do."


 Tomorrow, I get to be on-call for 10 HOURS at St. Vincent Hospital as a  on-call resident!