So it’s 2:20 AM right now, and I’ve just spent the last 14 hours studying. I think I’ll call it a day. But before I head to bed, I just wanted to share this interesting success story that I’ve recently come across. This is the story of Kevin Ham, a graduate of UBC medicine who took a career detour in 1999 and built a $300 million empire. Business magazine calls him “the man who owns the internet” and “the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of”. So who is Kevin Ham really?
I'm all about giving credit where credit is due, and I have to say that UofCalgary's medical school made the best interview weekend video I've ever seen this year.
If you read my where do I see myself in 10 years reflection, you'd remember that solving problems in our health care system outside my own future clinical practice is something that I'm interested in.
The schedule is pretty sick too. A few weeks each summer, several 4-day weekends per year, and then bam, you've learned a ton of cool, relevant stuff and are a Harvard alumni too!
So during this past week, there was a lot of commotion regarding Canada’s commitment to the G8 Maternal Health Initiative. The tension, specifically, revolved around the issue of including legal and safe abortion in Canada’s maternal health initiative in Third World Nations. Whereas Canada’s closest allies recognize that maternal health must include reproductive health, family planning, and access to safe abortion, Canada’s Prime Minister and current Conservative government rejected the inclusion of safe abortion in its initiatives in an attempt to avoid the abortion debate. To gain some context on Canada’s official stance on the issue, we look to the events of January 28, 1988 when the Supreme Court of Canada removed all legal restrictions on abortion. In other words, abortion was allowed throughout all nine months of pregnancy. There still exist provincial guidelines, but they do not have the force of law.
So, I thought I would just share this with you and see what your opinions are on the matter.
For some background information on the issue, please see the following news articles:
It's no secret that the medical profession is a prestigious one. The society often looks up to physicians and equates the word "doctor" with "intelligence, wealth, and importance". It's no lie that physicians play an important role in society. But what are the consequences of putting the medical profession on such a high pedestal? Not only can it breed a sense of elitism and entitlement within the medical profession, it can also motivate people to pursue a career in medicine for all the wrong reasons.
So it is final! I am officially in WB-F (Wightman-Berris Academy, rotation F)!
In the 2nd year class at UofT medicine, the whole academy/rotation schedule ranking process has come under heavy fire because MANY people got choices low on their ranking. More than one friend of mine got their 12th choice out of 18 choices, and I heard that one person in our class actually got their 16th choice!
I don't know who said it first, and to me it sadly seems like to suggest a rather negative intention when spoken, but the phrase "those who can't do, teach" is quite common and as someone who genuinely enjoys teaching and sharing what I know, see it as a phrase that can actually lead to some valuable insight.
I think the original intention of the phrase was to suggest that teachers are those incapable of doing - for who in their right mind would rather coach, say, Sydney Crosby instead of being Sydney Crosby? The phrase is also often believed to imply the opposite - that those who can do would not want to teach.
I can't write Day 1 because I already failed and didn't blog yesterday. Guess this is harder than I thought (actually that's not true, I expected it to be hard).
I have to say that so far I'm enjoying Brain and Behaviour (B&B) more than the other topics we have covered in medical school so far. I'm not particularly surprised, considering that neurology is one of the few reasons I went into medical school in the first place.
They did a nice job of easing us into this part of the program. Yesterday we started with a standard one hour introduction to the course lecture, followed by two hours of five short presentations to get us interested in B&B by showing us clinical applications, and then just two real lectures in the afternoon.
Yesterday there was a reunion for Toronto MacShad 2005 alumni, with about six of us in total. I don't think I had seen many of them in a super long time, despite many of us not being too far away from each other, and quite a few of us relatively close, in fact. They are all fantastic people, and I had an awesome time, and wish I had reconnected a lot sooner. Shad has introduced me to so many great people and opened a lot of doors for me, I really can't be grateful enough, and am disappointed I haven't kept up as much as I should. Hopefully we can keep this type of stuff going - there were talks of a big 5 year anniversary reunion happening this summer, and I hope that goes down.
I had such an awesome time that it made me wonder how much more I'm missing out by not reconnecting with a ton of great people I've met. I've actually been disappointed for a while that I've lost touch with so many good people I've met over the years.
So anyways, I'll throw this out there: If we've met before, had some good memories / ton of fun but have since lost touch, and you are in the downtown Toronto area, email/Facebook/whatever me and let's meet up for a drink/coffee/whatever.
For those of you who don’t know, PIMPING is a legitimate term used in the medical field, and is defined as a time when a attending physician (the Pimper) poses a series of very difficult questions to the student (the Pimpee). It’s a term that had been popularized by Dr.Brancati in his classic 1989 article “The Art of Pimping”. Those who are not in medicine may not appreciate the degree of distress in which pimping may cause among medical students. Nevertheless, each medical student eventually finds his/her own unique way of dealing with it. Some embrace it, some (the all-stars) thrive on it, some have evasive tendencies and avoid being picked on at all cost, and some are simply hopeless.
Just last year, Dr.Detsky published an article also titled “The Art of Pimping” in the Journal of American Medical Association to revist this deadly art that is so pervasive and ingrained in the culture of medical education. In the article, he offers advice for both the pimper and the pimpee on how to deal with each other. In my opinion, medical literature doesn't get any better than this :)
