I Hate Med School – And That’s Okay

I hated the selfishness I saw festering in my colleagues. I hated noticing how our passions died, how we began to work just hard enough to get through the day. Dreams clinical and humanitarian prowess fell by the wayside, and we shuffled forward towards that degree like zombies past their expiration dates.

Four Years Later: A Metamorphosis

Today this blog turns four years old. Technically a few minutes to midnight yesterday, but it’s much of a muchness really. Four years ago I wrote about practising speculum exams on sim-dolls in the skills lab. I was so embarrassed to do a bimanual examination on a doll in front of my male classmates. Everything was

Another new beginning

Things have not been going very well of late. Mostly it has just been my own personal issues that unfortuantely do have the ability to get me down and out. Needless to say, the Musculo test on Friday was atrocious. Not only was the work difficult and volumous, but I could not concentrate or focus

Rearranging the Syllabus (Mentally [Again])

As a student – any kind of student – one’s favourite academic activity is to criticise. Your syllabus, modules and lecturers are all weighed, measured and found wanting. I am going to take a wild guess and say that of all courses offered the world over, medicine is the one that varies the most from

Neurosciences 371: The first dissection

South African medical students are very fortunate in that we always have access to cadavers for dissection. Many western countries, as I have been told, simply don’t have these available to medical students. My class started dissecting in September 2009. The new syllabus is all about integration, so where in the past curricula students spent

Le Document pour MB.ChB.II

The inspiration for this document came during my second year while studying for an end-of-block test. At the same time, the then-first years were studying for Pathology, aided by “Le Document”. [If you are a Tygerberg Medical student and you don’t know Le Document, I really pity you.] Anyway, somewhere in this time period I

Studying for exams: Reproductive System

Today I studied for my Reproductive System examination. Yes, I am trying very hard to take this studying-thing seriously. The more I study this system, the more I am scared of having children one day. Nevermind that, the more I fear my Obstetrics rotation which will happen next year. That is a bad thing, since

Endocrine System: When studying for the exam

Yesterday I studied for my Endocrine System exam. I have decided that I simply cannot have a supplementary exam in January as I need actually to have a holiday in the short time provided I won’t be able to take too many textbooks home with the airlines’ baggage allowances for domestic flights Endocrinology is supposedly

Introduction to Clinical Medicine: Learning to Listen

One of the most important things they try to drill into our heads at Med School is the ability to take a good, relevant history. If we get a question in a test or exam asking, “Patient X has these symptoms, describe the steps you would take to reach a diagnosis” and we do not

Introduction to Clincal Medicine: Learning to probe orifices

As mentioned before, I am currently in the last quarter of my second year as medical student. The module my class is handling at the moment is called Introduction to Clinical Medicine. This is where, after almost two years of intense theoretical training, we get introduced to the clinical set-up of medicine. It is a