Back to Lectures...

The main clinical block was now over, meaning we were back in lectures. After having a summer away from it, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in again. There’s something about getting up, grabbing a coffee and spending time with your mates in a lecture on something that confuses you by the fifth slide.

The lectures from now until Christmas will involve the foundations that were taught from first year and help guide us into the symptom-based teaching of after Christmas.

In comparison to first year, we were taught about every system individually. Now, we are being introduced to more complex physiology, like the turnover of skin, and how this process can be disrupted and present clinically as a disease. This year is more disease-based than normal physiology.

Our labs contain more interesting practicals, such as understanding what flow cytometry is and how it can be used to work out which cells are in a sample to the metabolism of aspirin. This is definitely a more sciencey block which is quite nice after just finishing clinical placements and times on the wards.

The knowledge we have developed this year can help us work out what tests and investigations we may want to do. Using the results from investigations, we are able to work out a possible diagnosis of particular patient cases.

In our clinical parts, we have been taught greater details on taking a well rounded history. For example, how to explore the different components of a drug history to make sure you don’t miss anything out. Like how people sometimes forget to mention their contraception drugs when giving the list of their current medications. Furthermore, we are completing system examinations on patients in the hospital and the GP after taking a history which is helping to marry together our findings!