Overall, medical school is pretty great. At least that's what I keep telling myself. The workload is insane, your world gets reduced to things in and around med school, the debt is.. well we just won't even go there. But it's a worthwhile endeavor, and you tend to feel accomplished when you pass your exams or impress your clinical leaders. And you're surrounded by 100+ people all doing the same thing, so there's a sense of camaraderie (the people in our class are pretty awesome).
However, I do have one criticism, one qualm if you will, about medical school, and it is this: you constantly feel like you're being thrown from one thing to the next. Unfortunately, I don't really see any alternative. Originally I planned on writing about how the layout and culture of medical education promote this shuttling behavior, and how it hurts students in both the short term and long term. After thinking about it though, I don't really see what could be different. Medical school year one is a strange place. The first semester, you barrel through biochem and anatomy while starting your intro to medicine and problem based learning classes. The sciences are particularly guilty of moving from topic to topic. Granted, they have a lot of material to cover. Unfortunately, you almost constantly feel that by the time you master something, you have two or three new things to do (if you're lucky, only two or three things).
Additionally, you're often shuttled from one topic you've never encountered before to another topic you've never encountered before. The intro medicine class is very guilty of this. For example, we interviewed our first real patients as part of the class. We did this without really knowing what we were supposed to accomplish or even how to do it. And this really gets to the root of my criticism. I think the reason we (fine, I) feel like we're bouncing along from one thing to the other is simply because there's an abundance of information, and we haven't yet developed the filters to manage it yet. It's difficult to know what the important parts of biochem and anatomy are because we haven't had an exam to spotlight where the important details are coming from. Intro to medicine is even worse because we have almost zero knowledge about which questions are important and relevant. So, even when we know what to ask, we have no idea why we're doing it. And strangely enough, we won't even get that knowledge until second year, when pathophysiology is discussed.
But, I can see why we do it this way. First, curricula are hard to completely reinvent so we can only reform parts at a time. Plus people dislike change; blame it on the humans. Second, you can't filter information if you don't have any to start with. If I don't learn how to take a detailed history, I won't know which parts I can skip over or include. If I don't memorize the muscles and there innervations, I won't have the information to make a diagnosis. If I don't know how the cell membrane is affected by deviations in extracellular potassium... well, that one is stretching it. Ultimately, we just have to run the gauntlet and assume/tell ourselves it will work out in the end.
