Sodium/Volume Homeostasis Seminar, PBL, and HIV Documentary

Today was a pretty good day, except that I'm just so tired that I can hardly see straight. I think the lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me, or maybe I'm coming down with something. Our seminar this morning was about how the body keeps a constant volume of fluid and salt. This relatively simple concept (that you have to keep constant levels of things like salt and water if you want to stay alive) has the fancy name of homeostasis. I thought the seminar was ok, not the best I've ever attended but not the worst. Maybe it's just me, though, because everyone else was pretty gung-ho about how good it was. I still like kidneys, but I have to tell you that they are incredibly complicated.

PBL went relatively well. Even though we had talked last time about trying to make our objectives into discussions rather than presentations, I don't think that it's really turning out that way. Not that we didn't have some good discussions, but I just don't see a huge difference between how my last group did presentations and how my new group is doing them. I'm not complaining, because I thought we did a pretty good job with our presentations last block, and I'm glad to see that this is continuing with my new group. Our case is going well too. My next learning objective is about the histology of the glomeruli, which are the tiny blood vessels in the kidneys that do the actual filtering. I chose it on purpose because I know that I need more experience with histology. Speaking of which, I have made a promise to myself to start studying histo more. I've been reading my book and atlas, and also looking at the SIU website some. Unlike our own histo website, the SIU one has explanations so that I know what I'm looking at. Thank you again to those of you who wrote to me with suggestions for other websites. I'll be sure to check them out.

As I said on Monday, this is National AIDS week, and today the AIDS Awareness Group was showing a documentary about people with HIV. Of course, the main theme of the documentary was how evil the pharmaceutical companies are because all they care about is making profits off poor people living with HIV and no medications in third world countries. I'm not saying that pharmaceutical companies are Mother Theresa....far from it. But come on, let's have some balance here. That aside, the documentary was interesting, especially the part that talked about how Brazil made anti-retrovirals for HIV-positive patients available free of charge to all of its citizens who need them. Of course, to do that, they needed a supply of generics, and those come from India. Ironically, many of India's own HIV-positive citizens do not get the drugs they need, since the drugs produced in India are being exported to Brazil.

I don't have anything more to do at school today, so I'm going to the gym and then home to study and buy some groceries. The weather is still snowy and cold. And the streets are disgustingly slushy.