[update] First test done for medicine.

Today I completed the first test for the MD. It was a multiple choice test with 60 questions in total. I think that I went reasonably well, although there were 1/4 of the questions that I wasn't that sure of the answer to. Nevertheless, it should be a comfortable pass. I'm not that sure if it will be an H1 though; I guess it depends on how many of those I was unsure of that I got right. We'll see.

It was only worth 5% so that isn't very much. Majoring in pharmacology helped, as 10 questions were directly assessing it, and a few more questions were from other subjects but were also covered in the pharmacology major. There were other things that I had learned from my biomed core subjects which helped reduce the workload for the MD.

In any case, it's good to get the first test out of the way. And it's also good that I seem to be learning the material well without struggling that much.

사랑비 (Love Rain; Korean Drama)

I have recently been watching the Korean Drama called 사랑비 (Love Rain). One of the main characters is acted by Im Yoona (임윤아) who is one of the members of Girls' Generation (소녀시대). She also happens to be my favorite member.

The story starts in the 1970s where two people meet each other at uni, but unfortunately one of them has to go to the army and another one gets TB. At that time, South Korea would have been a developing country (unlike today), and so the girl (김윤희/Kim Yoonhee) who had TB went to America with her grandma to try to get treatment. It seems like they lost contact unfortunately (although she eventually recovered) and they don't see each other for many years. Meanwhile, they have their own families, but their respective children somehow bump into each other and the plot continues.

As a coincidence, we were learning a bit about TB this week as part of Respiratory block. Yoonhee would have been quite unlucky to get TB, because symptoms appear in about 10% of all people infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis over their lifetime. 10% is still quite a considerable percentage, but that means that 90% of people infected can live without any symptoms from TB.

[update] First dissection session, first test for MD

The past Thursday, I had my first ever dissection session for human anatomy. It was nice to have the privilege of being able to dissect cadavers, where people have agreed to donate their bodies to allow medical students to understand anatomy well. I handled it OK psychologically, as did others in my group that I could see.

That said, everyone in the Melbourne MD program had to have done anatomy before anyway as a prerequisite, and so almost everyone would have had experience with prosections anyway (and so they should feel pretty comfortable with dead human specimens by now); with dissecting being the next step.

Next week, there is the first test for the Foundations in Biomedical Science subject. It's worth 5% of the year long subject, so it's not that much. But I should still prepare for it. Right now, I am most confident in pharmacology (my major subject in biomedicine) and biostatistics (which I think is very logical, and doesn't require as much time to remember everything unlike most other subjects).

Friday 13th: Lucky and unlucky numbers

Today is a "Friday the 13th". In some western cultures, this is an unlucky day.

The concept of lucky and unlucky days, and lucky and unlucky numbers, is quite funny. It's something that is often based on superstition. In western culture, it seems like the unlucky number is 13, but in East Asian culture, the number is 4.

There's even a whole Wikipedia article about what they call "tetraphobia"; fear of the number 4. Basically, the word for number 4 (四) sounds very similar (or identical) to the word for death (死) in many dialects of Chinese and various other languages like Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese which have incorporated those Chinese words into their vocabulary (like English has incorporated many French and Latin words into its vocabulary). So the number 4 can be associated with death.

When doing things for other people in these cultures, it's good to know about the unlucky numbers so that you don't inadvertently offend them. However, thinking logically, it is quite implausible for the number 4 itself to be intrinsically unlucky just because of its pronunciation.

I remember bringing 4 water bottles into last year's GAMSAT. It seemed like the right number to last me throughout the whole day; not too little to be dehydrated but not too much to need to go to the toilet too often during the exam. At home, when I thought of bringing 4 water bottles, had a passing thought of ironically bringing an "unlucky" number of water bottles into an exam which could decide whether or not I would enter medicine. But it seems like I got through it well still. That said, my pen saying "Monash University Arts" on it did run out while I was planning my essay (probably more related to the amount of ink there was there originally than bringing in 4 water bottles), but I had some spare pens anyway.

But during the Melbourne interview, I was a bit nervous when we had to choose which interviewing station to start off with. Even though I knew it was just a superstition, I made a conscious decision not to start off at station number 4, even though I had the option to. Now that I look back on it though, it seems like a strange thing to have done. I did like the interviewer I had first up though, who I also had for my last station due to Melbourne's interview format, so it seems to have worked out well. It's unlikely to have been anything to do with the number 4 though. Incidentally, the person who did start off with station 4 did make it into the course.

And now in Medicine, for this semester my CSL and PCP (Principles of Clinical Practice) group numbers all contain a 4 in them. When I received my allocation, I was quite amused with the allocation of two "unlucky" numbers. But then again, it is just superstition, so it's nothing to be worried about.

Science and Medicine

The hard sciences of chemistry, physics and especially human biology have traditionally been a large part of medical courses. It had been known that sufficient understanding of human biology was required to be able to treat patients in a satisfactory manner. However, due to criticisms that medical courses in the past focused too much on the science and not enough on the softer aspects such as communication, ethics and population health, there has been a trend towards adding more of these aspects of medicine into medical courses at the expense of science.

Some doctors now comment that certain medical courses do not teach enough science, putting too much emphasis on the other components. I wouldn't be too surprised if that was true in some universities. I hoped that Melbourne got the balance right though.

So far though, a quarter of the way into first year, I don't feel that they have overemphasized the aspects other than sciences in our course. In our subject of Foundations in Biomedical Science (we don't have separate ethics subjects or population or personal development subjects; the other two subjects for first year are Principles of Clinical Practice 1 and Student Conference 1), the vast majority of our lectures are about biomedical science as the name suggests.

There are a few lectures of population health. One type of "population health" lecture is about evidence based medicine (EBM), encompassing a limited amount of biostatistics and some things about appraising studies, which would be quite important in medicine in terms of keeping up to date with current best practice. We don't actually learn that much about how to calculate the statistics too, unlike in first year biomed. I think EBM definitely has a place in the course.

The other type of population health lecture is about social determinants of health, including global health. We also haven't had many of these lectures so far either, so I don't feel that it has been overemphasized in the course at Melbourne.

Surprisingly, we have only had one ethics lecture so far, which was more of an introduction, in foundation week. Maybe they couldn't cram everything into the one preclinical year, so they decided to mainly give us the foundations in science to learn, and delayed the teaching of other things until later in the course. But in any case, I am pleasantly surprised that Melbourne hasn't seemed to have overemphasized the non-bioscience aspects of the course from what I have experienced so far. Then again, Melbourne does seem to have a reputation of being somewhat "old-school" in that regard, and that does seem to be the case to me.

[update] Midsemester break, sem 1 2012

Right now, we have the midsemester break of semester 1, 2012. This means that about a quarter of first year has been completed.

This break is an opportunity to catch up on rest, and also to revise any material from class.

The first test for first year medicine at Melbourne will be in the second week after the break, worth 5% of Foundations of Biomedical Science, covering the foundation, cardiovascular, and respiratory blocks.