Layabout
September 22, 2009 on 10:16 pm | In Medicine | 5 CommentsI can’t help but feel a bit of a slob on psych. While my fellow medics slave on the geriatric wards, stand for hours in surgery, or are yelled at by SpRs as they fail to cannulate people and spray blood everywhere, I am sitting about on comfy chairs being effectively force fed flapjacks and chocolate while listening to radio plays and occasionally talking about schizophrenia. It’s not exactly unpleasant, but I hardly feel like I’m learning much medicine or indeed much at all. It is, I will admit, a little frustrating, and I aim to remedy this frustration on friday afternoon by arming myself with my ID, my stethoscope, my pen torch and a few spare hours and roaming the wards in search of patients to talk to/examine. Get back into the medicine part of it all, because with the exception of my visit to a certain psychiatric facility, it’s all been rather unexciting. Interesting, fascinating, intriguing – yes. But exciting, no. I need practical skills, theory I can learn from books.
In other news, I have a headache. I got out the ol’ ibuprofen (if I go to sleep with a headache, I wake up with what feels like a smashed-in skull at about 3 in the morning) and took a couple of the pills out of the packet and lo! and behold! they are Beautiful Pills:
Unfortunately, the camera does not truly capture their beauty. However, I was reminded of this:
Night all!
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It may be unexciting but it’s still bloody important, not least because I suspect that a lot of medical professionals out there do prefer the tangible, injectable medicine to something wishy-washy like mental health so as a result they are possibly less well trained in it. I’m sure you know that and everything, and I’m sure it doesn’t make the day-to-day experience any less frustrating. Just, well. I’d imagine that it’s probably too easy to disregard, that’s all.
Comment by Lucy — September 23, 2009 #
Mental health is great, no question – it’s not so much the fact that I don’t get to sew people up or stab them that I am lamenting. The issue is that I can read about mental health in books, I can make notes on bipolar affective disorder and depression on my own, but I can’t see patients. In two weeks, I have seen two patients, one of whom I saw for ten minutes in an outpatients appointment, didn’t speak to because I was just sitting in, and was for all intents and purposes recovered.
It is the lack of training that is the issue. Learning, yes. Training, no.
Comment by Callan — September 23, 2009 #
Oh OK, fair enough. It’ll come, I’m sure.
Comment by Lucy — September 23, 2009 #
I have that card!
Have fun seeing people on Friday. Did you read the article about more people dying at the beginning of August when new Doctors start work? I send it to my cousin, who’s just started out terrorising patients. I feel it’s my role as the big cousin.
Comment by The Girl — September 24, 2009 #
@ The Girl: I’m sure it was appreciated, and yep I saw the article – I heard a statistic somewhere that for every medical student to be trained up to registrar level 7 patients die earlier than they would have, but I’ve never seen it again so I think it might be a rumour!
Comment by Callan — September 25, 2009 #