FCM and Digestion Seminar

Today's FCM seminar was about wellness research. It was interesting to me mainly because I am worried about getting diabetes. So far, my blood sugar has never been high, but I have a strong family history. We had two articles, one about diabetes and the other about coronary artery disease. Both articles came up with the astounding conclusion (read my sarcasm here!) that lifestyle intervention was equal to or better than pharmacological intervention, and that the combination of both lifestyle intervention and pharmacological intervention was better than either alone. Well, I am not going on any pharmacological intervention for now, since I don't currently have high blood sugar. But I'm doing my best to keep an eye on it, watch my diet, get frequent exercise, etc. Not that med school is exactly compatible with an overly healthy lifestyle, and it's only going to get worse....

Our seminar was about carbohydrate and protein digestion. At the beginning, we had an intro with all of us together in the library. Then we had to break up with half of us going downstairs to one of the conference rooms (yet again, I was in this lucky half), and half staying in the library. The assignment itself was really cool though. We were supposed to come up with a plan for a clinical trial to test a drug. So we talked about which patients to test, how to design the study, what endpoints to choose, and how to make sure it was ethical. It was fun to do the exercise, but afterward, we had to present our discussion to the other half of the class and they had to present their half to us. That format is definitely not my favorite.

Tomorrow we have the OSCE. It's going to be a long day, so I'm going to head home and start studying for seminar now. I still have to finish my PBL learning objective too.