Seminars, PBL, and POD

It's Friday the 13th, but today wasn't a bad day. We had two seminars again, and they were both fine except for too many of us still being crammed into the conference rooms. The first one was about anabolic and catabolic processes in energy metabolism. We went through several cases in small groups and then discussed them as a class. I really liked this seminar. The second one was on placenta histology. It wasn't too bad as far as histo seminars go. Dr. Prayson, the pathologist I like so much, was the one who taught it. He does a good job with leading seminars. I still don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the gross anatomy of the placenta though. I need to review this stuff some more.

We finished our PBL case. The ending was pretty anti-climactic (and of course, it was a happy ending). Because this patient had metabolic issues, we spent some time discussing biochemistry and nutrition requirements. We also talked about the cause of the patient's disease and how it should be treated.

Our POD talk today was on female urinary incontinence. Apparently giving birth to a child increases a woman's risk of having stress-induced urinary incontinence later in life. (That means urine can leak when she coughs or laughs.) The more children she has, the greater the increase in risk. The speaker studies incontinence after vaginal distention in rats. I can see a lot of problems with this, not the least of which is that female rats are anatomically very different than female humans! Older women also have a higher risk of urge incontinence, where they have bladders that contract too much and they feel like they need to go to the bathroom all the time. This is the kind of incontinence you see ads on TV for all the time.

My PA wanted to meet to discuss my portfolio, but I couldn't stay because I had to leave school a little early. So we just emailed about it instead. Most of the comments and suggestions I got were grammatical kinds of things anyway.