Our deans have told us to start thinking of classroom medicine in terms of patient presentation, and vice-versa, using patients we meet as opportunities to study diseases in greater and more memorable depth. While I didn't take their advice at the time, it must have sunk in. Second year is about disease, which presents in people -- it is relevant to turn not just to First Aid for the boards but to Harrison's tome of the natural history of disease. After meeting a real patient with gallstone pancreatitis this week, I looked up "gallstones" and "pancreatitis" to understand what causes them, how they are related, what symptoms they cause, and how they can be treated.
This morning we were shown a cartoon of an imaging study showing where Alzheimer plaques cause damage in a brain (in red):
The amazing thing is that you can connect those locations to the normal function of those parts of the brain (e.g. hippocampus and memory, parietal cortex and visual-spatial processing) and then relate them to symptoms in Alzheimer patients.
Anyway, it's starting to click, and that's cool. So, what's for dinner?
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