Second Day of Medical School

Today we started out by having an ethics seminar, followed by a small-group discussion of three ethics case studies. There were three main topics covered in both sessions: falsifying data (ex. dropping data points that don't support your hypothesis), fabricating data (i.e., making up fake data), and authorship issues. There are three things needed in order to "earn" authorship rights: you have to have intellectually contributed to the project and/or done a significant amount of the work, you have to have contributed to writing the actual manuscript, and you have to have signed off that you agree with the final paper. We also discussed examples where one or more of these factors was missing. Authorship is definitely a tricky issue.

After the session, we took photos for the CCLCM viewbook. There is an undergrad working in the admissions office, and she was our "patient." Let me remind you that we just are in our second day, and we have absolutely no clue what we are doing. But wow, did we ever look good in our white coats and with our stethoscopes. The good news is that I was able to hear the girl's heart beat, and she's definitely alive. But in case you were wondering, those photos of the M1s examining patients are totally staged.

We had a couple of hours off, and then we had to do our CPR training. Wow, that was really intense. We were there for FIVE HOURS. There are three CPR tests that you have to pass, plus a written test. The first test was to do CPR on an adult with another person to help you, and to activate and use an automatic external defibrillator (AED). The AED is easy to use; it's the actual CPR that's tough. Then we had to give CPR to an infant; you don't use an AED on an infant, and they're a lot smaller and easier to manipulate. In a way, that makes them scarier though. Finally, we had to do one-person CPR on an adult with no help for two minutes (five rounds). That's tough. I actually have a bruise on the heel of my hand from pushing on the manniquin's chest so much. The written test was pretty easy if you had read the book, which I had. There were twenty questions. If you ever have to take the CPR test, remember that the rate of compressions should be 100 per minute. The ratio is 30 compressions to 2 breaths for adults, and the same for kids unless a second person is present, in which case you do a 15 compressions to 2 breaths ratio. There you go. That's CPR in a nutshell.

Now I'm just fried, but I have to read for my PSS tomorrow. I hope that these topics aren't things that I don't know much about, because I don't think I can learn much more today.