Technically speaking, I spent five hours on Nov. 18th learning getting to the
STEM center, talking to Sam (head of ASBMB), preparing my fake kidney booth, and helping the students make them. That was an eventfully night full of interested students and stained red McKenzie hands.

I also spent three hours helping some high school girls from my home town (yes, one was my foster sister) understand math and science on the ACT. I will probably do it again over break, hooray!

MCAT2015: A Better Test for Tomorrow\’s Doctors

Wish I would have seen this video before I finished my paper.

McKenzie McConaha

Honors 4013

Dr. Pardue

7 November 2011

Are Current Pre-Medicine Standards Enough Preparation For Our Future Doctors?

            “In nothing do men nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.”  This is a famous quote from Cicero which describes they way in which every doctor wants to be seen.  What is the first step for doctors to reach this god like state?  By knowing all there is to know about medicine and the human body?  What if I could tell you that doctors are being held back by menial restrictions called the pre-medicine program?  My research question (are curren pre-medicine standards enough preparation for our future doctors) addresses all of these previous stated questions and many more. (Read the rest of this story.)

To Be a Great Doctor
I titled this post what kind of doctor do you want to have, because I have been thinking about what kind of doctor I want to be.  I am in my junior year here at Tech and medical school is just around the corner.  During my medical school years, I will learn a lot about how to be a doctor.  However, I want to make sure that I establish what kind of doctor I want to be personally, ethically and morally now, so that I never loose track of who I want to be.  Like in the scene in Patch Adams I posted, would you rather have a doctor who knows her medical background backwards and forwards but is a prick or one who is nice and may not know as much?  I say why can’t we have both.  Why can’t I be a doctor who treats everyone like they are my best friends and knows medicine very well.  This is what kind of doctor I strive to be and I hope I never loose sight of that.

I know that you may say that most of the doctors you know are nice and know their stuff.  However, I know doctors who seem very nice to their patients, but are horrible to the people who work for them and are around them.  I have heard stories of doctors who treat their nurses like shit.  Doctors who give their nurses meaningless tasks just because they are nurses and work for the doctors.  I have heard stories of doctors who are womanizers and doctors who are hard to get along with all around.  From my experience I have learned people work best as teams, and  teams work best when they work together and feel welcome.  The doctor I have been shadowing gave me some great advice.  She told me, “The secret to being a good doctor is to find a good nurse”.  What I took from that was to be a great doctor you need to surround yourself with people who want to work with you and want to make a great team.  I want to remember that when I become a doctor.  I also don’t want to be a “prick” doctor.  I want to make sure every patient feels welcome to talk to me about anything.  In some ways I want them to feel like I am part of their family and that they know when they need something from me medically I will do my best to help them.  I also want my patients to feel like I will be able and beyond capable to help them.  So, do I think I can be a compassionate doctor who is damn good at what she does?  Hell yes, and I hope to never forget that.

I am going to put the three activities I would like to do on here so my group may comment on them.

1. Life Support Systems
The objective of this activity is to have students design and build models of lie support systems for a settlement on the moon.
~Divide the class into Groups.
These groups are based on the main objectives for a life support system on the moon. (air supply, communications, food production and delivery, electricity, temp control, recreation, waste management, transportation, and water supply)
People in each group should be given roles such as organizer, researcher, builder, recorder, artist, etc.
The groups will be given an ABC fact sheet about their main subject on the moon and must be able to compare and contrast to what we already have on earth to see what will work the best.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/180587main_ETM.Life.Support.pdf

2. Differentiation

The Objective is to see how minerals separate from each other in a magma ocean.

Background-When planets begin to melt the materials separate.  The heaviest such as metallic iron sink to the bottom.  Low Density magma rise to the top to form the crust.  This happened on the moon and there is information on the activity sheet that talks about this more in depth.

~Materials and Procedure

We need water in a transparent container, sand, pennies and  toothpicks.

Take a hand full of pennies, sand and toothpicks and dump them into the water.  The pennies (heavier density/moon core) sink faster than the sand.  The toothpick float at different angles at the top (represet feldspar on the moon that formed its initial crust).  The water in between represents still-molten magma.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/180570main_ETM.Differentiation.pdf

I am just going to post the sources as I find them. Every time I find a new one I will go back and edit this.

1. Is a Wall Street Journal article talking about whether Organic Chemistry is useful for a doctor or not.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122152898348840633.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

2. This is a journal article talking about the history of premed requirements.

http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(08)00973-X/fulltext

3. This is a blog talking about the importance of physics to doctors.  I like this one especially because it has other people’s comments about what they think.

http://quantummoxie.wordpress.com/2006/09/09/doctors-without-physics/

4. This is an article talking about the Relevance and Rigor in Premedical Education.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0803098

5. An article talking about the importance of premedical classes and the different reasons as to why they might be important.

http://www.lifescied.org/content/4/1/7.full

6. A medical school student’s blog who talks about why it is pointless to have the pre-med classes required.

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/06/changing_medical_school_requir.php

7. An article that talks about why organic chemistry is important in medicine.

http://www.bretoned.ca/science/lynnmcm.htm

8. A blog posted by a nurse explaining why physics is important to medicine.

http://raymond-physics-report2.blogspot.com/2007/01/2nd-report-ko-po.html

9.  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/576324_2

My question is what science classes do medical doctors use the most and why. Because I want to know what classes make the most impact after graduation in order to understand how professionals incorporate classes into their jobs/lives. I plan to compare undergrad classes between colleges for pre-medicine and I want to look at the medical remodel in the 1970’s. One of the sources I want to look at is medical student blogs.

I want to talk about what influences you to make a decision on what education path you want to follow. To do that I am going to talk about what influenced me to become a science nerd.

I didn’t always love science. In grade school I thought it was one of the harder subjects to grasp. However, I realize now that was probably due to the fact that in grade school and some of high school science was all about memorizing and nothing else. I never learned or understood the significance of what I was memorizing. (Read the rest of this story.)

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