Second Year Physical Diagnosis

We had a bone path seminar this morning, and it was actually pretty good. I make my judgment based on the fact that I paid attention without having to really force myself for nearly the whole two hours. Usually, my attention span starts lagging a lot sooner....I haven't forgotten some of last year's painful histo sessions yet. :-P

This afternoon I had my first physical diagnosis class. It's done a little differently this year compared to last year. First of all, only half of us have it at a time instead of the whole class. Last year all 32 of us had PD every other Wednesday afternoon, but now only half of us do, and the other 16 go on Tuesdays. Today we had a communications session that was more or less the same as what we did last year. But the physical diagnosis part afterward was really awesome. There were four stations set up in the four PBL rooms. We went in groups of four from room to room every half an hour.

The first room my group went to covered the legs. The standardized patient was this really funny lady who kind of talked back to the doctor while he was demonstrating the exams, so it was fun for us. In the second room, some podiatrists showed us how to examine the foot. Feet are yucky. No thanks. The third room demo was about examining the shoulders and arms. That one was ok, a bit lecturish though. But the fourth room demo was by far the best. This was the one for the spine. The two docs in there were both orthopedic surgeons, and they were pimping us, but it was done in a gentle and fun way. I am not a huge fan of orthopedics in general, but I liked this one spine guy enough that I am thinking about emailing him to see if I can go work with him in his clinic one day. I think I will ask him, but not this semester. There's just too much going on right now, like my 7 AM MS class tomorrow....