Acid Base Seminar, PBL, and POD

Today was a completely awesome day. Our seminar this morning was about acid-base chemistry, which could have been a little bit dry. But the speaker did a great job of making it interactive and fun. He gave us several sample cases to solve, and we went through them as a group to determine what each patient's problem was. The only thing I didn't like about the seminar is that I felt the speaker was too reliant on memorizing equations. It is definitely possible to solve the case problems with more of an intuitive approach, and since I don't like memorizing anything, I am happy to report that memorizing the acid-base equations appears to be unnecessary. You can see what we did on the website that he made to teach us about acid-base chemistry: http://www.acidbasedisorders.com/

In PBL, we finished our case for this week. Since I was the computer scribe, I had to make the concept map for the group. We have the board scribe do a draft on the board first, and then I copied that and made it look prettier in Power Point. I think that this week's case was good and we were pretty much satisfied with how it was resolved. But I would have liked to have gotten a little bit more information about the patient's social history. Sometimes it's frustrating to not be able to actually ask the patients questions!

Our POD seminar today was about narcotics and respiratory depression, and it was fantastic. I think that it was one of the best research seminars we've ever had. The speaker was the same one who did our earlier seminar this morning, and he was just absolutely interesting, engaging, and hysterical. He has a very interesting background, too. He started out with getting his MD, then went to graduate school for a PhD, and along the way he has also picked up a few MS degrees. Talk about being a life-long learner! The great news is that he posted his entire talk on line. You can see it too if you want: www.opiateresearch.homestead.com

Well, I am going to go work on my CAPPs questions now. I didn't buy one of the books we were assigned to read yet, so I want to go use it in the library for one of the questions.