The seven-year old girl told her mom, "A boy in my class asked me to play doctor." "Oh, dear," the mother nervously sighed. "What happened, honey?" "Nothing, he made me wait 45 minutes and then double-billed the insurance company." (See how innocent that was?)
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 prestigious. 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 :)
While I had previously written a brief post on admissions consulting and why there was nothing inherently wrong with it, I feel a need to write a more complete article on it and examine the issue on a deeper level.
Before I begin, let my begin by saying that I have essentially done consulting for scholarship, awards, undergraduate admissions, and medical school admissions for numerous individuals, both friends and even complete strangers. I have never asked for a single penny from any of these individuals. I currently don't charge for advice/help, although that's not to say I haven't considered it (as a side job) and it's something that could happen for me sometime in the future - who knows?
(As a side note, some of you may have noticed the Consulting Services link on the left hand menu. This is not a consulting service provided by MedChatter - it is simply a link exchange we are doing to help promote MedChatter to medhopefuls).
Because of that, it may surprise some of you that I don't have any problem with those who do charge for consulting advice. Understand that whether I personally choose to charge or not for the help I provide is completely irrelevant. I still believe there is nothing inherently wrong with charging for admissions consulting. There are problems that can stem from admissions consulting (which we will soon discuss), but the existence of some related problems alone is not enough to say admissions consulting is "wrong" or "should not exist".
I think far too often in too many things we focus on just one side of the coin. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be counter productive if you're looking at the side that prevents you from succeeding, and succeeding big.
While I don't have any specific role models that I look up to, one of the things I have come to admire are people who are masters of their trade - those considered "great" in their respective fields.
One of the things I have come to realize is that a key characteristic such individuals have in common is that they are fearless. To be more specific, what I mean is that they are not scared to lose.
I think it's important to make this distinction between being fearless of losing and simply being fearless because fearlessness is all too often misconstrued as foolishness when it need not be.
Yes it is true that there is foolish fearlessness. For example, a fearless person who takes a test without studying is foolish. Fortunately, that's not the type of person I am talking about and clearly not the type of fearlessness I am advocating for.
A master who is fearless is one who recognizes the failures or losses he may experience, but chooses to not focus on them. Instead, he focuses on succeeding.
There are many reasons why being fearless is critical to being successful, but there are two that stand out to me.
Focusing on Failure Prevents you From Taking Advantage of Opportunities to Succeed
This past Monday I took my Metabolism and Nutrition mid-term (I think I passed...) As usual (and as expected) the weekend was a major cram session, and I finally turned into bed at 4 am (where I proceeded to roll around in bed with my mind constructing random thoughts about hypokalemia which made no sense whatsoever). Basically my whole weekend was spent between phases of studying and whining about studying.
In undergrad, I usually only spent one or two days studying for a test or exam. Here, I had to start like 3-4days in advance. So basically, the amount of material I needed to know for my medical school exam was 2-3 times as much as for an undergrad exam. All that said, the exam questions weren't any harder than any undergrad exam.
If you ask any medical student about whether medical school is challenging, I'm sure they'll say yes, but I'm sure they will also tell you that it's not intellectually harder (though I guess it depends on what their undergrad major was. But I would say this is probably true for any student with a science background). Rather, the reason why academics in medical school is more challenging is simply because you have to learn a significantly greater volume of information in a shorter period of time.
Why is Your GPA Important to Admissions Committees?
