Hormone and Receptor Seminars, PBL, and Pediatrics Clinical Skills

Our seminar was divided into two halves again, as were we. My first seminar half was about hormone regulation, and the second part was about peptide hormone receptors. They were both pretty good seminars, especially the second one. But our new attendance policy went into effect this week, and it's totally miserable being crammed like sardines into these tiny conference rooms. I may be the only person in the entire class who dislikes the policy because it makes the seminar rooms too crowded. But I really do think that if they're going to require all of us to come, they need to find some larger rooms that fit us all comfortably.

This PBL case continues to be annoyingly SLEEP-intensive. (SLEEP = social, legal, ethical, economic, and psychological.) I'm glad that I didn't do a learning objective for today though, because we came up with a pharm one this time. I'll be doing it for Friday. Ironically, it turns out that even the pharm objective has quite a few SLEEP aspects to it, since the best medications for the patient's disease also tend to be the most expensive. Well, this should not be a big surprise to anyone: if you are wealthy, you get better health care than if you are poor.

Our regular physical diagnosis and communications class is over for the year, so we are doing some specialty physical diagnosis and communications sessions now. Today's was about pediatrics. One of the residents brought in his young son for us to examine. It was actually not a bad session, even though we are all exhausted and I didn't even come close to finishing the 70+ pages of pediatrics reading we were assigned for today. The boy was about three years old, and he was amazingly well-behaved. After his father demonstrated the exam techniques for us, we were practicing some of them. The father told the boy to pick who he wanted to examine him, and he picked all of the girls. Yeah, he may only be three, but he is definitely a boy!