Tag: medical school

Mechanisms of Disease Block

Hello.

Long time no see my friends. I started writing this while in the middle of my second test for my MOD (mechanisms of disease) course. But then lost my drive to write so I’m picking it up during summer lol.

It’s been a wild ride. And I’m definitely looking forward to a much needed break this summer. But let’s see if I can find my groove again with blogging!

What Is Mechanisms of Disease?

This course is basically a preview of how the second year will be and recaps several themes that you’ve seen in your first year. The biggest thing that seems to recur so far is immunology. It is in a much more general sense than our immunology block was and for next year’s class, you guys won’t actually have a true immuno block. They will just piece it in wherever they feel you should learn some of it in your other systems courses. Honestly, I think that’ll make it harder on you guys but who knows, maybe your class will do better that way with it.

MOD and most of your second year will be based off the book “Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease” by Kumar, Abbas, and Aster. Don’t worry, it is in your online book of textbooks that the library has. I don’t remember if it has a link for you to freely get to it online, but this might be one that you actually want a paper copy of. You will be reading a lot out of it.

IT IS MASSIVE.

It’s a great arm workout though. Just make sure you occasionally switch arms that you are holding it in so you don’t get that weird one sided bulk over the other one.

Courtesy of giphy.com

But all in all, this class is supposed to tie in more “doctor” type stuff in how they approach things. So it is a blend of literally all the different courses you’ve had like other blocks. Previously, each lecture would be labeled “histo” or “physiology” or whatever. In MOD, it’s all just thrown in there.

HOw Does this course run?

At the end of the day, they test you based off of the information in the Robbins book. They did try to restructure the course a bit so that more students came to class and they presented more high yield information to help narrow it down. Some professors did a really great job at this. Some professors still struggle with changing this. 

You need to decide which professors' lectures you feel it is worth to go to or watch their lectures, and which ones you feel the book helps you out more. I will give you which ones I feel did a good job for my personal learning style, and which professors I felt I needed the book for a little later on. Again, you need to make the decision on what works for you. Who knows, maybe they will switch it up again for next year.

Most of your lectures for this course will be 2 hours a lecture topic. Some large chapters have been broken up into two 2 hour lectures just because they are massive. And let me tell you, those days are definitely rough to get through.

So you will have a lecture(s) in the morning and usually the rest of the afternoon to study; provided you don’t have any other courses or scheduling things left. At the beginning of MOD, we were finishing up OS and PCM so our schedules were a little bit more packed. After those classes ended, all we had was MOD which was nice.

Majority of your learning will again be either the lectures that are given or book reading. But honestly, most of it was book reading.

You will then usually have CIS lectures. This is mostly question-based and given by the professors. It is a second chance for you to see the material. They do have some important high yield slides or things they highlight. IN GENERAL, you should not technically be seeing any new material. It should be review from the lecture already given. Although honestly, I usually go and notice that I didn’t grasp a chunk of the material presented the first time. So it is great to see what they focus on.

For each lecture given, it should have either it’s own CIS or one lumped in with another lecture. Sometimes they have 2 CIS’s for one lecture. It just depends. I highly recommend going to the first one for each professor. If you find it helpful, continue to go. If you don’t, don’t worry about it. It is free questions and some professors structure it in a case type of way where it progresses through a case but hits multiple key lecture points. It can really help tie concepts together. As you progress through MOD and you find that some professor’s CISes don’t jive with you, then don’t go. I would show up for the first 30 minutes and decide if it was worth it or not.

Others won’t tie it in as nicely, but they are still questions for you to see which topics they seem to like. And don’t be upset if you don’t get a chunk of them right. I usually get most of them wrong. Not to mention they sometimes pick topics that aren’t the big overall picture or that you may not be tested on because well, they can. But it definitely helps me focus or tailor my studying more!

What do i need for this class?
  • I recommend obviously getting Robbins. Because this is what they test you out of…

You could also get “baby Robbins” which is just a high yield, smaller book of the material. It is better for review and seeing the topics in a more condensed way. I don’t recommend getting this as your sole Robbins reading though. You will miss several details with this.

There is apparently a “medium-sized Robbins” too. Dr. Martin on Joplin’s campus can help you find it because it specifically is a bit harder to find. She also has a copy of it if you decide you want to test it out. She recommends this book if Robbins is too much for you but and you want to cut some of the detail out, without missing the more major details. I didn’t take advantage of this, but maybe it’ll help you.

  • Get a book stand. No seriously. Get one. You are about to do so. much. reading. This is the one I got Reodoeer Bamboo Reading Rest and it is big and sturdy enough to hold big Robbins and lightweight enough to put in my backpack.
  • Your normal ipad/computer/note-taking system.
  • Oh, and get your book unbound. You’ll thank me later (unless you like carrying the heavy thing everywhere with you).

Really that’s it. You don’t need a ton of things for this course. It is just time consuming given the reading and needing to do multiple passes because of the shear amount of volume.

I used Eagle Eye Printing off of 32nd street. A lot of students complained that other places that do re-binding of textbooks would refused to take the cover off for you. So you would need to remove the cover before going. This place will remove the cover, save it for you if you ask, and rebind/break up your book for pretty cheap. AND apparently: if you have a group they will discount it!
Resources:
  • Robbins. Read. Take notes. Do group study sessions to cover the materials if you learn better that way.
  • Pre-made Anki decks. There are some decks from previous years available.
  • Zanki decks. I mentioned this under “How I took notes (3rd exam)”. Particularly helpful from that set will be the one associated with Sketchy if you use Sketchy.
  • Gasper’s notes. Ask a second year or your big. There are basically outlines of the Robbins book available that either a fellow or a previous student did. If you would prefer to look at the outlines instead of read, this could be a better study tool for you. I didn’t find it as helpful because it wasn’t super organized within each chapter.
  • Sketchy for micro if you are more of a visual learner. To each their own. Our class grouped together to get a discount. See if someone in your class is willing to start this up or if a second year/fellow can help ya’ll out with this. But it is much cheaper to get a group discount if you plan on using this at all. ( I was too overwhelmed first year in MOD to use this well, BUT it was very helpful second year and for boards as well).
  • Pathoma. If you use this, do not solely rely on this as your main source. This is technically a review book that can be helpful. Your main source is Robbins. Pathoma should be to assist you in clarifying what you have questions on. I have not put money towards this yet because I’m not sure if I want to use this or a different resource for boards later on.
  • If you don’t like Pathoma, use SketchyPath. If you already have a Sketchy account for Micro (highly recommend), you should also have access to pharm and path. If you are a better visual learner, use the SketchyPath to help you with topics.

As always, with anything additional outside of class, try it first before buying it to see if it is helpful or not for you. No point in wasting your money just to jump on the bandwagon if it won’t help you!

How I took notes (1st and 2nd exam):

Like everything, I was all over the place. For the first exam I used the LO’s. Which is not everyone’s style and that’s okay. When you all first start MOD, absolutely all, and I mean all of you will be freaking out because it is a different type of learning. Which means you have to change your study style a bit. You will all be bothering the professors like we did and asking all the second years how they studied and asking each other what they hell everyone’s doing.

The problem with LO’s however is there are usually no less than 30 per lecture. Sometimes there was upwards of 70. So clearly, I couldn’t do all of them all the time. But for a handful of lectures I did LO’s in the beginning. But to be honest, this year each LO was a heading in the book. So you basically had to read the whole chapter anyways to fill out the LO’s.

For both the first and second exam I would also read and then underline or write in the margins of my book of high yield information. I would then go back and type it out. Yes, this was time consuming and probably not the best way to learn. However, I learn better by writing and re-exposure. And the awful part was, even though I would understand it while reading it, when I came back to it to type out the notes I had completely forgotten all of that information…

Before both those exams I would review either the LO’s or the notes that I had typed up. The longer the chapter or the more new information in the chapter, the more I had to review.

How I took notes (3rd exam):

Your 3rd exam is not really out of Robbins. Dr. Putthoff will have sections of the book that he points to in there. But mainly he will teach out of “Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple” by Gladwin, Trattler, and Mahan.

Ugh. This course. This used to be a longer course for the class above me. We got 2 weeks to learn this entire 400 page book which is actually a review book. So, I’m very salty about this.

He will test out of this book and honestly not much else. Some students noted that the information in CMMRS contradicted what was in Robbins. Some people used Sketchy. I did a mix but honestly was so checked out that I didn’t care.

I really only learned bacteria and viruses. I punted fungi, parasites, and antibiotics. I know. Crazy. But I ended up with a 68% on that exam which is only 1 point away from getting a “passing” score. Which means it was close enough with the curve that I wouldn’t have a problem.

There were questions that were straight out of CMMRS on the exam. Things like “what are the 3 strains that cause neonatal meningitis?” which wasn’t quite in that format but that’s what he was getting at. That was mentioned no less than 3 times in the book, but not necessarily mentioned in other micro resources. Same thing with “which bacterial strains cause otitis media?” There are several like that in the book which showed up on our exam.

As for Sketchy. I think Sketchy can be a really great tool in helping you try to remember what organisms are what. However, it would be more helpful if you didn’t have to do the entire micro course in 2 weeks and then get tested on it. It is a memory/picture device and on a handful of the videos I could recall almost the entire picture. On others I couldn’t. The problem is you will end up watching god knows how many videos and then trying to keep them separate is a nightmare. Hopefully they give you all more time. I had to watch each video more than once to try to absorb it.

If you do the Sketchy videos, you should also do the Pepper Anki cards from zanki. You can download them from Medschool + Anki’s website. There are other pre-made Anki cards as well here. The problem is, even though these are comprehensive, they are massive decks. But, the Pepper one follows the Sketchy videos only. I think the new version may have some information from First Aid in it as well.

EDITED NOTES:

So after completing 2 years, MOD is your first introduction to path right? Your entire second year will be pathology. Since drowning all second year, I have noticed some helpful hints that they like to test on:

  • The charts they mention? Look at them. There will likely be a question or two on them.
  • REVIEW THE MORPHOLOGY BOXES. Putthoff and Dobson will pull questions out of the text itself, but you need to know these. They are the ‘high yield’ points for the diseases. Bolded = know.
  • If you go to KCU and use Alex’s Anki cards; they are pretty spot on. They were fairly good for 2nd year as well seeing as they were made specifically for KCU classes. You may have to rearrange them though given their exam content was split differently in 2018 than in my year or your year.
  • If you like Zanki, this is in depth as well (it goes off of First Aid) but it is not specific to your KCU course/class. It is good content to know in general for boards, but not always applicable/nit-picky enough for your class exam. Pick ONE flash card deck to do; either Alex’s or Zanki. Don’t do both.
  • And just like with anything else in medical school= you need to review it MULTIPLE TIMES. Path is not something that you can just learn in one go. Read the morphology boxes, use Pathoma, use sketchy path if you need to, use the Anki cards/any flash cards. Path isn’t a subject that you can talk through like physiology; you need to just know the facts cold.
PRofessors:

Dr. Singh: I really liked her teaching style. For the most part you didn’t need to read and she would point you to the exact pages that she thought the book explained better in her slides. In general, you could learn just from her slides and be fine.

Dr. Martin: She got stuck with some not great chapters, honestly. But, when she has the time she will teach well. In general, she will usually mark high yield concept slides. You don’t necessarily have to read the book from her slides because she adds everything, but she does use shorthand and doesn’t always have a key for her shorthand. If you can get her notes version of the slides, it will have what she talks about in lecture that isn’t on the slide and usually her shorthand notes. Some of my classmates didn’t feel they needed to read the textbook for her lectures given she usually puts most of the information on there. If you have trouble with her shorthand or with a few missing words, you will need the textbook.

Dr. Dobson: I didn’t really like his teaching style at first. It could have just been that he was the first professor who taught in this course and I was trying to get used to the different learning style and not actually him. But, I ended up liking him a bit later on. He tends to use a lot of pictures in his slides and not necessarily super easy to learn off of all the time. He started having us follow along in the book with his lectures to see where he was hitting so you could go back and re-look at those sections if you needed clarification. That was much easier for me. Helpful hint: Use Alex’s cards or look at Gasper’s notes. They have tidbits in there to help you focus on where he likes to test. He can also take test exam questions from description boxes of pictures. It will be difficult to try to memorize everything possible, so use a guide to help tailor some places in your studying. But who knows, maybe you’ll understand it better than I did!

Dr. Puttoff: Ah. I think I disliked his teaching style the most. I try my hardest on this blog to give helpful, honest, and useful advice without bashing people. But I do have to say, I really really disliked the way he taught. I personally did not learn a thing from his lectures. I didn’t find his slides helpful. He states not to read the book, but you do have to read to get any information. Don’t worry, I stated all of this on my course evaluation in hopes that maybe he would at least put more information on his lecture slides for our second year. His notes are a hot mess and he just expects you to know all the information, but on the plus side, his test questions air on the easier side compared to Dr. Dobson’s or Dr. Martin’s. Know the stupid genetics crap. He likes cancer genes and cancer questions in general.

And I think that is all I can remember from MOD. Like I said, I was pretty checked out for this course. I scraped by and passed and that was really all I cared to do. Hopefully you all will have more motivation than I did and finish your year strong!

Cheers!

Neuro Block 1

Hey guys!

I’ve had a lot of really exciting things happen in my life recently. But also some very stressful ones. Today’s post is going to be similar to my GI and endo/repro posts. Neuro is technically 5 weeks long, but it is spanned over 6 weeks as we have spring break woven in there.

I’m definitely feeling the buildup of stress and burnout this semester. I was able to do okay for most of the first semester except when it came to renal. Ya’ll already know how I feel about that renal course. If not, you can check that post out. But coming back this semester has been much harder to deal with that.

My current pitfalls:

Medical school is great at breaking down all of those protective barriers you’ve built for yourself. Those insecurities that you could somewhat deal with before? Those walls have been smashed down. That insecurity will find a way to bubble back up and hit you at some point. And it doesn’t matter what that insecurity is.

Like take mine: apparently mine is feeling inadequate or not good enough. This is something I’ve struggled with for a very long time. According to our on-campus counselor, I probably developed this back when I was a preschooler. So like, it’s not going anywhere. (Not like ya’ll really cared to know that.)

I was really good at not letting this get to me. I learned to build up my walls last year and learned so many different ways to cope and realistically look at life’s problems without it completely deteriorating how far I had come. But the stress from medical school (for me at least) has slowly started chipping away each layer of that wall. Brick by brick. They each chipped, cracked, and slowly crumbled.

Until the next thing I know, this insecurity is bubbling up into almost every aspect of my life and affecting every thing I do. Now, I’m not saying that my fortress is completely torn down. But, it’s pretty sad looking right now. Not very impressive.

God damn insecurities. I don’t have time for you.

But they don’t care. They do what they want.

So currently, life’s been a bit rough in that aspect for me. My grades feel like they have been slipping and I’m back at not being happy with most of my performances. I try to tell myself that passing is good, or doing close to the average or slightly above average is good; even if it isn’t what I personally want. But sometimes that can be difficult to accept within yourself.

And because of this, my brain isn’t interested in putting it in a box and shelving it away. It wants to think about it more frequently. And because of that, I personally am having a hard time getting motivated to do things. Or at least to make my study time productive.

Some positives:

I also know that my blog has been a bit on the negative side lately. I would apologize, but this is a real emotion that people deal with and then try to hide. Everyone pretends that everything is okay and picture perfect.

It’s not.

But! I have had some good news on my end. In case ya’ll didn’t know, I was lucky enough to become a Student Ambassador at my school earlier in the year. As a first year, most of the spots to tour and do lunch panels and help the school with their public face went to the second years. They had the experience. But now, with the second years getting ready to study for boards and going off to do other things for third year, this means more opportunities for me and my classmates!

If you have ever interviewed at KCU, you will have run into one of our many SA’s. We help give tours, do lunch panels, and answer all your burning questions. We are also the face of the school to our community. This entails more things, but overall the biggest time you see us is when we represent the school to new and incoming students.

I absolutely adored both of my SA’s when I interviewed. I also knew that if I went to KCU this was something I wanted to do. Not to mention, it reminds me of how far I’ve come (but just how actually recently it was) that I was in your shoes interviewing.

I also recently became our school’s MAOPS president. WOO!!!!! Cue the confetti and champagne! This club is the biggest student club on campus, and it is also tied to the MAOPS organization that represents all Missouri DO physicians at the state level. I’m pretty pumped to take over this year. Apparently I even get recognized at Capitol Hill? Will let you know how that goes.

Lastly, I’m looking to do a medical mission trip this summer. I’m terrified but excited all at the same time. I’m looking at either going though KCU or another program. So my two options currently are to Kenya or India. Not sure yet where I’m going or if it will come to fruition, but that is the hopes! I’m so nervous, but also excited to start using and working on my skills that I’ve learned in first year. Not to mention, I know the programs I might be participating in need the extra hands. Let’s see if this hope turns into a reality for this summer.

Pre-Neuro Test 1:

Okay ya’ll. They really like to mess with our schedule. Given how they took the concerns of last year’s students into play, they rearranged our first year schedules to give us more of a summer and try to cut back on some of the “free days” they had. However, it definitely isn’t working out they way they initially wanted. At least not from a student’s perspective. I do know that given how things went this year, they are changing things for next year again. It may not completely make sense to the incoming first years, but knowing where my class brought up our concerns, they are trying to make it more manageable. Especially since we’ve had more than one unit now that time was taken away and it did not work out to our benefit.

I do not however understand why they are re-arranging when some of the classes are. Ya’ll better get ready for a tough first semester next year. Well, who knows. Maybe with them rearranging things it’ll make it easier in the end.

And if you read my last post on endo/repro, you know they snuck in an OS CPA and midterm exam that took away from our studying for that block. This time, we have a PCM exam snuck into our schedule for tomorrow. We have our first neuro exam and practical this coming Friday. And I’m only bitching about that because our schedule so far has been pretty packed.

We had 14 neuro lectures in our first week (this past week), and had 3 days of packed afternoons filled with anatomy labs, OS lab, and a PCM lab. I think we had a PCM lecture as well stuffed in there, but really, that was a lot of neuro. I’m definitely not all caught up yet and I’m having to take a hot minute to try to learn all the PCM I’ve ignored all semester…

Oops.

We then get slapped with another 6 lectures next week. And just like last week, our Monday-Wednesday afternoons are packed with labs. Not really sure when we are supposed to learn all this information, or sleep. Or both. Because we definitely don’t have time to actually learn anything.

Here’s to hoping they re-arrange the schedule to add more time to neuro next year for the incoming first years. I feel like I’m not really learning or at least learning it well right now.

Just know that KCU has a reputation for having a hard curriculum. You will get your ass kicked at times. And right now, this is one of those times for us!

Will check in later. Maybe. We will see.

Post-Neuro Exam 1:

Welp.

I mean, I kind of just accepted my fate the night before. The feeling I was getting while on campus was that most students were in the same boat as I was feeling. Overall, the content wasn’t necessarily hard. If we had some more time to actually learn it, I think it would have been doable. However, since we had an entire head/neck course (which is what constituted our first Neuro exam) in less than 2 weeks, it really wasn’t that doable.

In all honesty; I failed.

And no, I’m not ashamed to admit that here. Why? Because like I said, most of the classmates that I spoke to also failed. Or just barely passed.  We don’t have our averages back yet, but I’m pretty sure this average is going to be going down in the books.

And really I’m okay with that. I know I put everything into this test block that I could given the scheduling and hurdles that were thrown at me. At the end of the day, I was still gunna go home to a cat that mildly accepts me and gives me love, and a nice bottle of wine in my fridge.

The practical however I was hoping to do better. But just like with the written exam a few hours before, I didn’t have a good feeling about it. Who puts 10 some questions of embryo on an anatomy lab practical? Really?

Still a tad bit salty about that one. But ya know, I’m sure that average won’t be swimming either. So we will see.

Exam Breakdown:

So, out of 20 some lectures and 6 some anatomy labs, we ended up with 95 total written exam questions and 60 anatomy lab questions.

I’ll start with anatomy lab this time:

  • 2 histology questions (Yes I punted these hard).
  • 10 some embryo questions (I lost count honestly).
  • The rest were actual anatomy structures. Some were straight name this and some were slightly second order. The remainder of these were tagged either on bones, models, or the bodies.

The written exam this time around was mostly all anatomy. There was also embryo and histology on this exam.

  • 71 anatomy questions
  • 20 embryo questions
  • 4 histology questions

And yeah. That’s about it.

Tid-Bits for this section:
  1. You need to stay on top of the lecture material. Most people only had time for 1 pass. I chose to not actually look at all of the lectures (I think I didn’t look at 2 embryo and a histology lecture at all) so I could spend a bit more time learning all the dense anatomy on some of the other lectures. But just know, you won’t have time to get in 3 passes. You might get 2 at best on some  of the material. Try your best. Make use of your time.
  2. They will ask a lot of “if you get stabbed, puncture wound,” etc questions on this exam. There was also a fair amount of clinical questions, so make sure you look at your objectives to see what specific clinical diseases/scenarios they want you to know. They may put more in their slide set just because it’s “cool” or they really enjoy teaching it. But if it isn’t covered under an objective, it’s not fair game for a test question.
  3. You need to use your lab time wisely. Part of that is making sure you’ve at least watched one of the lectures from that morning. The likelihood of you looking for structures in the body based off of what you’ve learned earlier in the day while in lab is high. Quiz each other while you are dissecting. Go to other bodies and start seeing what those structures look like. Use that time. You have 2 hours where you have to be there, which means 2 hours out of your studying time.
  4. Blue link slides for testing your anatomy. Our professors did post several of this review links on blackboard for us. But, you also have access through KCU anyway I believe. If you have a different anatomy slide set that you’ve been using all year, use that. Stay on top of this anatomy.
  5. Man, don’t punt embryo on this exam. I was okay with not knowing all of it for the written. But I’m annoyed at how much showed up on the practical. A lot of it happened to be pharyngeal arch derivatives and grooves. But there was definitely information pulled for all 4 of those embryo lectures given showed up.
  6. The rest of the links that were recommended or sent to me involved some sort of anatomy resource off of the KCU intranet that we have access to. Acland’s, Thieme’s, and the Human Anatomy Resource link that KCU offers. I again didn’t have time for all of this, but if you have a chance to look at at least one resource to quiz yourself, do it.
  7. If you like making Anki cards and can stay on top of them, here is a tip from a girl in my anatomy group: When previewing the night before, make your cards. Edit them while you are in class going over the material to make sure they are correct. Review them that night. As Anki builds with time, this pile can get a little overwhelming though. But if this is how you enjoy learning the material, this apparently worked well for her.
  8. I used Teachmeanatomy.com for some high yield concepts at first. But honestly, I used a fair amount of youtube and Moore’s textbook itself to try to teach myself some of this material. A fair amount of content I didn’t quite get right away with just the slides and I personally needed to use our textbook to figure it out or look at a bigger version of a picture in the slides.

Lastly! 

Roll with the punches on this one. It’s going to be rough. At the end of the day, you just have to hope for the best when walking in to take this exam. There really wasn’t a good way to prepare for this beast. If you are getting the feeling that everyone else in your class is struggling, don’t be upset if you are as well.

Something our class has had to remind ourselves with this block: they can’t fail all of us. 

And in this case, it applies. It’s not that we wanted to do poorly, it is just how the cards seemed to land.

Update: Our class average for the written was 72% and a 73% for the practical. Which honestly, is better than I was expecting but not too far off from what E and I predicted.