Awesome-ness

My textbooks arrived! Actually it arrived yesterday, but no-one was home so they re-attempted today. So I purchased 3 books from an Indian distributor on AbeBooks.com, at the cost of AU$160 including shipping, via FedEx. They were Rang & Dales Pharmacology 6th, Netter's Atlas of Anatomy 4th, and Boron & Boulpaep's Medical Physiology 2nd Ed - two softcovers and one (the Boron) hardcover. Being the hardcover, Boron's cost about half of the total bill, but there appears to be no softcover version of the textbook.
On first inspection, it appears that I got the cosmetic-damaged goods. The corners are either bent (on the Boron hardcover) or slightly damaged (softcovers); the softcover spines are a bit damaged on the bottom. I'm not very sure whether this is the case for all retailers, and when I purchase more books in the future, I'll be sure to compare experiences.
One thing I noted was that although the Netters and Boron were labelled "International Edition", the Rang and Dales wasn't. As a result, the Rang and Dales also came with a StudentConsult code, which was surprising - I wonder whether it was a mistake or if the Rang and Dales doesn't have an international edition...
The paper is of excellent quality, and in full-colour. So I think they're quite genuine (the Boron is printed in Canada), just subsidised for their target market (desperate med students from developed countries trying to save as much moolah as possible). Netter's atlas looks brilliantly vibrant, and from this, I'm generally quite happy with this purchase. The local editions of these books would be about AU$400, so there's a saving of about 2.5 times (after considering postage); the drawbacks are the cosmetic dings and the International Edition labelling.

In other news, I think HP6 doesn't deserve the bad beating its getting from some members of the public. It's a bold move to not contain an epic battle scene; certainly a departure from the norm. I was chuckling a fair bit during the movie too, twas nice to escape the general darkness of the film. But in short, yes it does depart from the book, no you shouldn't avoid it at all costs, but yes you may want to consider your expectations before watching.

A Small Update

Thought I might write a bit more, since some time has passed. I got my stethoscope, but my books haven't arrived yet. It came with soft ear-tips, a back-up pair of soft ear-tips, a pair of hard ear-tips (haven't used them, and hopefully never will), a name tag, and two paediatric attachments - the bell and diaphragm. I quite liked the smaller diaphragm, and am yet to see why a larger diaphragm is more useful than the smaller one - the adult-sized diaphragm is not changeable though, probably because of my engraving. Speaking of which, I thought the engraving was done well, quite happy with it :)
One thing the Medshop description fails to include of the C&R Trikoph, is that the rims are non-chill. I was pretty worried about this actually, since every stethoscope except this one had "non-chill rims" in its description, but yep, rest assured.
I'm yet to have any other stethoscopes to compare the steth directly with, so I don't think I'm quite qualified to make a recommendation for this based on acoustics. From what I can hear, the acoustics seem pretty good; nice differentiation between parts of the sound, and it seems quite loud. I'll comment about this once I get another yardstick to compare it with. Also, if you ever come around to purchasing your first stethoscope (like I was), don't worry if the ends of the steth seem to put a lot of pressure on your ears, and even if it hurts to use it at first. After about an hour (cumulative) of usage, my ears seem to be getting used to it, and it's not really painful now, but merely slightly uncomfortable (which I hope will subside very soon as well).

I had my first abdomen physical examination for ICM this week, on a patient who could barely speak English (thankfully, our tutor spoke whatever language he was able to speak), which hindered communication somewhat. He was really nice though, very compliant and happy to sit through whatever I was doing. Other than that, nothing really remarkable occurred this week... except for today, when 2(!) lectures were suddenly cancelled. That was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Oh, and only one more week till UMATo9! The tension is palpable (get it? get it? naww yeh k that was lame) Signing out,

Back to School...

Well it's been a relatively uneventful but (as usual) very quick holiday, even though this one lasted a whole month. My call for extra temporary students for my little part-time tutoring thing pretty much failed, helped by my site's web server downtime (a week or so), and managing to hit one interested person, but not having his message until a few days ago (and thus pointless, because by then I had things arranged for the last few days of the holidays). I spent most of my holidays away from medicine, trying movies (a korean mystery named Mother), music (Adele's 19 album) and even going back to some books (John Marsden's Letters from the Inside is, in my opinion, worth a mention). One thing I did not stray away from was stethoscopes. Worrying about which stethoscope to get is probably equivalent, in med school, to worrying about which pens to buy for the HSC. But, frivolous as it was, I spent hours upon hours doing as much research as possible into the little pet topic of interest amongst med students. And finally, after all the blood, sweat, toil and tears, I made a decision: the Australian company 'Cumpers & Robbins' Trikoph (??) Cardiology (!) Stethoscope (a very important point to note) in Navy blue colour (an important decision, or so I heard, which I made in about 10 seconds). At $160, it certainly wasn't cheap (found a 10% discount voucher - 'Supporter5' for the store, Medshop Australia, which dropped the total cost plus shipping to $151) but it was certainly within my price range. Amongst others, I had the Littmann Master Classic II (single-head, single-lumen, standard diaphragm), Spirit Cardiology (single-lumen and standard diaphragm) and the good old Littmann Classic II SE, for which I was particularly enticed when I saw the 'FREE PENLIGHT' offer at Medisave.

Some key pointers from people I asked (doctors, cardiologist registrars and a few others) and what I gathered online about stethoscopes:
- Soft ear-tips apparently make a world of difference.
- They last a while. A long while. But they often 'grow legs' when unsupervised.
- One of my cousins is doing well as a doc with a Littmann Classic II.
- Brand-name appears to have minimal effect on steths, but Littmanns are far and away the most popular (by which reasons, I have not found out)
- The cheapest cardiology steths (from a decent brand) are better-sounding than the most expensive classic steths. I'm not too sure about this, and it will be one of the key things I'll be testing for with my steth.
- Single lumen vs double lumen tubing - contradictory anecdotes about this, but double lumens are quite standard in cardiology stethoscopes (although mine doesn't.....)
- Floating Diaphragm, Tunable Diaphragm, Floating Tunable Diaphragms, Bells, Paediatrics Diaphragms and Bells, etc etc. - Apparently, only C&R and Littmann have floating diaphragm factories. Hmm... this allows you to vary the frequencies of sounds you hear depending on the effort you push on the head of the steth. Once again, contradictory anecdotes found on the net regarding whether this is a good or a bad thing (having zilch experience, I'm sitting on the fence in regards to this)
- Length of tubing - Once again, contradictory anecdotes, some say longer allows you to not invade the patient's 'private space', whilst others say shorter allows you to hear better - I would side with the shorter team, since 22 inches (relatively short amongst all the 27 inch ones) is pretty much the length from your ears to the slightly bent arm anyway. Having said that however, I don't think it is a crucial difference - its hard enough to find 22 inches as it is.

I found that there was virtually no information for brands other than Littmann or Welch-Allyn, so, in the spirit of the medical student guinea pig, I will be reporting the results of my Trikoph stethoscope, and see whether it measures up to others (via the help of some colleagues).

You may ask 'why a stethoscope in the middle of the year?' to which I would reply 'because I didn't need it in the first semester', to which you may reply 'you don't need it in the second semester either' to which I would reply 'my friend said we did, and I want to get one soon anyway'. I was also shopping for books and might get a penlight - not just for med, but for computer repairs and upgrades (quite handy to see where jumpers are without taking out the disk drive - if you don't know what jumpers are, ignore this whole thing). But for now, am looking forward to another exciting semester of hard-core medicine, so sayonara holidays!

A review of the first half of Semester 1, Year 1

This should actually be a much larger post, since the beginning is pretty memorable, but I'll condense it since I'm posting this at the end of Week 1 of the second half of semester 1 (wow what a mouthful).

So our first week begins with a whizbang (or perhaps not) introductory lecture by UWS Medical School's Dean, Neville Yeomans, to which our parents were invited. Made new friends, found some old ones, and the rest of that. We then had an introduction into the PBL style of teaching, which I had much forewarning about and so wasn't really that revolutionary; and then a series of lectures on what it means to be a doctor, ethics, morals, and all the rest of it.

The rest of the first half of Sem 1 was pretty much an introduction to all things medicine. Our lectures were mostly named 'Introduction to MRI', 'Introduction to Pharmacology', 'Introduction to Communication Systems in the body', etc. The UWS Course has two main components; Foundations of Medicine, which you could call the science side, and Personal and Professional Development (PPD), which you could call the humanities side.

Those components are covered by a week-long Problem Based Learning (PBL) case study (Monday being the introduction to the new case of the week, and Friday being the debriefing of that case), as well as lectures, practical sessions which were all in the computer lab for this first half, our ICMs (Introduction to Clinical Medicine - one 1.5hr session per week at a hospital as part of our clinical experience) and later on, dedicated PPD sessions.

So the PBL style of learning is essentially studying a fictional case of a patient who presents (or comes in with) a certain symptom, upon which we would hypothesise over reasons for the symptom (i.e. diagnose), note down anything we didn't know about the case that we should need to know (Learning Issues, or Objectives), and going away for the week to research by ourselves on the case. Lectures were generally related to the case of that week, which provided a little oddity in that we could predict what the problem with the patient was by deducing information from lecture names, hah! Then on Friday we would gather back and report on what we've learnt, and find out (a) what the actual diagnosis was (which is usually not a surprise by Friday), (b) what the official Learning Issues that UWS wants us to know are. PBL Groups are groups of around 10 people, with 1 tutor who is not a 'content expert' - i.e. we aren't meant to ask him/her about details of the information in the case (such as: "Is this really a myocardial infarction?") because he/she will reply with "I don't know, maybe you should put that up as a Learning Issue", heh..

Over the cases we had in that 1st term, we covered a host of things such as epilepsy, spinal injury, myasthenia gravis, anaemia, heat stroke, and sunburn, along with many others due to the broad hypothesising that we were meant to do as part of the PBL process. So it's been an interesting first half of the semester :)

We also had a Formative Test (read: a test used exclusively for your own standards to see how well you would do, andd it does not count towards final year marks) which we haven't received the results of back yet; I'm not too sure we were taking it seriously, but I certainly saw that there was much that I had not covered or had forgot due to lack of revision. Which brings me to...

...how much effort I put into this first half of Sem 1, Year 1 of Medicine, versus the HSC. I must say that I've done exceedingly more than I ever did in the HSC, and I probably would have done much better, were I to have put that same amount into last year. I didn't though, and it's a regret but I've learnt from it, so I've decided to just do as well as I possibly can, in the knowledge that this is part of my career, and not working towards a certain number. So yep, that about wraps it up :)

Oh, and I spent my holidays semi-productively, revising most lectures, but also visiting old school friends and things. So I thought that was a very good start to a non-procrastination filled life ;)