via npr.org
Great medical thinker Dr. Atul Gawande talks about what to do for patients with incurable illnesses.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128828629#
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Where I live is quite amazing because it's close to the airport, major shopping outlets, downtown Toronto, and also Lake Ontario, and along with it – dozens of lakeside parks. I discovered that these are great places to read!
Today I started reading a new book: Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat, an Indian writer. This is the book that the hit Bollywood film 3 Idiots is based on, and as I read the first couple chapters, I realized how similar the two works are. Last time I checked, Bhagat was not given due credit for the story and this controversy was being highly-reported in the media.
Anyway, back to my point about the lakeside parks. We went to one beside a marina in Oakville, a neighbouring city. Under a cloudy, grey sky I pulled out my book and sat on a bench on a small hill overlooking the lake. The air was cool but temperatures were warm and the water moved gently. It was such a relaxing scene and the perfect place to be on a summer afternoon.
I was well impressed that despite living in the city, we have such spaces around us that give us the escape we find going 3 hours north to a cottage in the middle of the woods. When it started raining, there was a gazebo in the same park where I comfortably read the book amidst the sound of rainfall and the smell of fresh air.
It was a peaceful moment and I had to share it with you!
via amazon.ca
Books fascinate me and I love buying them! When I enter a bookstore, I see a handful of books that catch my interest and I would love to read them. The problem is, I seem to love bringing books home, but never get around to finishing them!
I started reading A Long Way Gone in the summer of 2009, but I’ve finally finished it now, a year later! I picked this book because I’ve never read anything like it, and it is a fantastically written piece of work which tells a bone-chilling story with poetic fluidity.
The story of Ishmael Beah, a child soldier who now lives in New York City, is remarkable. Before I say much about the title, I strongly recommend this read for someone looking to gain perspective and find value in their own life. Having read the book, I feel more connected to the civil war in Sierra Leone and indeed to my own humanity.
Elsevier, the biggest medical book publishing company, has cool new online resources that complement their leading products. Check out the interactive Textbook Test Drive of the famous Kumar and Clarke’s Clinical Medicine below!
It was like going to a black tie event, except some people were in shorts and some dressed casually, with only a few holding up the proclaimed dress code (some didn’t even know why they were there, which explains the flip-flops). This is what going to medical school was like.
Having just arrived in the UK from Canada I had this preconceived notion that I would find myself at Medical School surrounded by studious, glasses-donning, book carrying, over-achieving geniuses who hurried on their way, with no time for hellos or chitchat.To my surprise, I saw relaxed, friendly people; some who excelled at sports, others who were part of bands and choirs, students who dedicated themselves to helping the less fortunate, and yes, even people whose specialty in life was drinking and partying. I was beginning to realise this wasn’t a gathering of elite prodigies of the world; it was just High School 2.0.
In the lecture theatre of 250 new medical students, I saw the same diversity I used to see in my classrooms back in Toronto, the most multi-cultural city in the world! It was refreshing to meet my new British classmates, as well as students from around the world. Within a week, I went from having a local network of friends in the suburbs of Toronto to having contacts in England, Hong Kong, Sweden, Malaysia, Cyprus, Angola, Thailand, Romania, Indonesia, Lithuania, Kenya and beyond!
Finding similarities in our differences, the international students quickly formed a large group that sat at the front of the lecture theatre, filling up the entire row. It seemed like our idea was quite foreign as well, because most of the other students fought for seats in the back row.
This was all too familiar: geeks in the front, cool kids in the back. It quickly became apparent to me that the motto of medical school was “Too Cool for School,” in that everyone pretended they didn’t do any work. Reputations were prioritized ahead of grades here, because it was more important to be a cool Doctor than to be a good Doctor. As such, the rows in the lecture theatre became a reflection of the social gradient at school, so the further down the stairs you walked, the bigger the nerd you were.
The first week at medical school was a tsunami of information. Lectures were scheduled all week, so as all the other Freshers became familiar with the campus bars, we became familiar with Lecture Theatre One. In our breaks, student reps from the upper years would bombard us with flyers from the dozens of medic’s societies we could join; everything from sports like badminton, tennis, basketball and squash, to Wilderness Medicine, Surgical Society and Marrow, to my all-time favourite, Karni. Karni, short for Karnival, is a story on its own. It is the University of Nottingham’s student-run charitable organization, which raised over £688,000 last year. For all the good that Karni does, it surely creates a ruckus. Most Karni events involved going on a coach to near-by cities dressed up in eye-catching costumes, and collecting money from local residents by any means possible. If students didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it because of the unlimited alcohol and hangover guarantee provided on the way back from these “rag raids.”
Things quickly became routine: you went to lectures from 9am to 5pm, came back, (cooked if you were self-catered, as I was), ate dinner, and made plans to go out in the evening. Whereas in Canada, the weekend was seen as the time to party, I found that at university in the UK, every night was a club night! The next morning, you knew someone had gone out if they had messy hair, came in late, couldn’t stop coughing, and fell asleep in lectures. Even the people who didn’t go out came to lectures like this because they couldn’t possibly afford to have anyone know that they had been doing work! Reputation was everything.
I’m now in second year and when I look back at the beginnings of medical school, my mind surely paints a colourful picture. Going to a club night and seeing students from first year straight through to fifth year dressing up as cartoon characters, transformers, Red Bull cans and iPods is not what I expected, but it was certainly welcomed variety.
As I make my way to lectures, I hear the first year students planning their fancy dresses for the night, and it seems all too familiar. No longer is the idea of medical students drinking and partying like anyone else strange to me; this is all part of the diversity in student life.
Maybe next time I visit my GP, I’ll ask him about his vibrant days in medical school.
Vaibhav Gupta is a second year medical student at the University of Nottingham and writes on his own personal blog site http://notjustthefuture.com/.
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via blogs.bmj.com
Finally got one of my pieces published as a blog by the StudentBMJ magazine for medical students all over the world!
Today on NotJustTheFuture.com – a guest post written by my friend Adam Sibley at www.talentedyoungpeople.com!
Finally we are getting to that point in the year where it starts getting warmer and the evenings start to draw out. Only a week or so away from moving the clocks forward and everyone’s mood seems to lift. Its amazing what extended daylight does for the morale of this country (the UK).
The dark cold days are gone well for a few months at least. This is the time of year where people start thinking of booking a last minute holiday somewhere and start making their summer plans. If you are young this is the time of year you have been waiting for as it means you can stay out longer playing in the street or in the park.
All I want to do is to implore as many of our viewers as possible to use this positive feeling and channel it in to your drive towards your dream. Its amazing how much more you can get done or what you can achieve with extra positivity.
Also now the nights are drawing out make the most of them. Go and do the things you couldn’t do in the winter. Go and enjoy and do things in the evenings in the great outdoors. Go and do some jogging, cycling, adventuring just make this summer the summer where you really make the most of it.
Adam Sibley
Founder of the Talented Young People organisation
www.talentedyoungpeople.com
“Envisage it, Believe it, Achieve it!”
”Shaking up the Youth of Today”
http://www.talentedyoungpeople.blogspot.com
A quick post here to appreciate National Express coach service in the UK for providing free WiFi on their buses! In fact I think I took a train of theirs once, and that had free internet too! Yours truly is writing this message from that very connection. Good idea, no? Makes your time on the move more effective…or more entertaining!
Cheers National Express!
It seems odd to break the silence on this blog with a post like this, but I thought I'd get back to sharing with you the random opinions that pop into my head.
We get lecture handouts printed for us into a big booklet at Nottingham Medical School, and before even going to the lecture, you can tell if it's going to be a good one or not by the formatting of the notes on the page. Some lecturers make headings and sub-points so clear, that all you have to do is follow along and learn the medicine. One lecturer in particular is so terrible in organizing the layout of the page that I spend more time figuring out what word belongs where and under which category then I do learning the material!
Organization, and a sense of hierarchy on a page is so important because in science we categorize everything, and in fact these groupings make material much easier to learn! When words and diagrams are randomly floating around on a page incoherently, it's really frustrating!
Two other points loosely associated to my rant above:
1. Dear Lecturer, there is NO point putting every single word on a page in block letters. Nothing stands out and everything is hard to read.
2. For a few years now, I've used a particular pattern for highlighting that follows this sort of hierarchy that I'm describing because it just helps me follow the material and brings consistency across my different courses. Green is at the top, for the main heading, then pink for subheadings or key points, orange for important information in the text, and yellow for less important info that still needs to be noted and shouldn't be left out. When I come back to review my notes, through this colour coordination, it's easy to extract info! Try it if this is something you struggle with.
So overall I agree this is quite a random post and I have no idea why you would be interested in the way I use my highlighter…but if you are, then cheers!
(Exams are a month away – I'm being driven crazy already!)
I walked down the big spiral stairs of the medical school foyer and saw it filled with students. There was chatter, banter, laughter, smiles, hugs, tears, phone calls and celebration. There was champagne. Today the 5th year medical students got their results, and with the flick of an envelope and a glance at a word, they became doctors.
So much enthusiasm and happiness was warming to see! It was honestly such an experience. You could see five years of effort pay off as Nottingham grads celebrated their success and made plans to spend the next 8 weeks of freedom in exotic places around the world.
Yet I also saw how delicate the difference is between a pass and a fail. Some friends that I know are excellent medics, who have in fact been leaders in their year, saw themselves fall short by literally one or two marks. They will be back in May to do resits and will likely pass, thus moving on with their classmates into an F1 doctor post in August. It's clear if you can survive 5 years of medicine, you can be a doctor, and these students know too – they will make it through – yet it's so difficult to hold yourself back when everyone else has relief printed on the paper they hold.
I wish all the graduating students success on the next stage in their career. I'm hoping to draw on the delight I saw today to motivate me to stay focused and aspire to achieve on my course.
Cheers to becoming good doctors!
I just wanted to take a short moment to say the blog recently saw its 2000th visitor pop by!
It’s been 3 months since I started my blog, and I post once in a while about a variety of things that are on my mind or that I come across and find interesting! I know you’re out there reading this here and there, and I appreciate all the positive comments I’ve received you in person about the blog. Next time you’re here, I’d be really happy if you wrote a short comment under a post about what you thought!
Happy Reading guys!