the med kid

an indian medical student from jaipur talking about the mundane, the difficult, and the uncomfortable.

[medkidblog]

Online NEET PG coaching?

What is online coaching?

Some of you might not know what online coaching entails so to give a brief overview about it- it's basically a series of video lectures which you can access at any point of the day or week, for a certain amount of time (according to the plan you choose) for six months, a year or more.

These may include all subjects, so subjects of different years according to the packages provided by the "coaching center".

You may be given additional material such as MCQ banks, PowerPoints of the lectures, and online test series.

Online coaching is growing because not everyone can afford going to classroom type classes because of distance or time.

Why I chose online coaching instead of classroom coaching?

My initial reason for choosing online coaching over the classroom setting was the distance I would have to travel to go to the center, since my university is about 45 minutes out of the city. Apart from that I would have to miss Saturday classes.

But the main reason for my apprehension was that this type of coaching didn't help me during my drop year before college and back then there were still more classes per week. I knew that there would be a limit to how much I could learn and retain from 12 hour classes.

That's when I started looking for alternatives to the traditional system. I spent some time researching different coaching companies and what they offered for the price before deciding which one I wanted to join.

Benefits of online coaching over classroom coaching

You can study whenever you want

No time taken up travelling to the center

Usually cheaper than classroom alternatives

Studying can be spread over the week instead of packed into 2-3 days

You can study in the comfort of your residence

Benefits of classroom coaching over online coaching

You get to interact with other people studying the same material

You’re technically “free” for the rest of the week to study on your own

Good internet speed isn’t a factor

They keep moving forward, self motivation isn’t an issue

My experience

Taking online coaching is probably the best decision I’ve taken in my final year. Classroom coaching was never possible for me because of travel and time. And since I prefer having a more balanced approach to studying, online lectures gives me the perfect opportunity for that.

To anyone interested, I’d suggest assigning specific times to study. For example, I go to the library after class everyday and watch 2-3 lectures. It gives me a system to work within and leaves me the rest of the evening after 8 to wind down or do other things.

While I don’t think taking notes is necessary, taking notes of the lectures helps to refer to easily instead of having to open the lecture and scroll to that part.

The way Dr. Mentors works is that I have access to the videos for a total of 18 months and 3 times the total number of lecture hours. This means that if there are 500 hours of lectures, I can watch the videos thrice or for 1500 hours.

The package also comes with online test series from PrepLadder which will be good when I want to see how I stand next to students from the rest of the country.

TL;DR

To summarize if you are self motivated, don’t want to travel, have good internet speed wherever you will study, and aren’t a fan of the tradition coaching pattern, online coaching is probably a good idea.

I urge students to research about different institutes to compare the price to what they offer, and then make an educated decision on which to go for.

Information (from the websites)

Dr. Mentors: https://www.drmentors.com/pages/packages

Validity: 18 months

Cost: Rs. 26,500 + taxes

PowerPoints of all lectures

MCQs on all topics

Includes test series from PrepLadder

OnlineMBBS: http://onlinembbs.com/new/

Live online classes

Validity: 1 year

Cost: Rs. 40,000

Online tests

Notes included

There are more institutes offering online test series, question banks, etc. which I’m not listing here since that’s not the focus of this post. Though, if any one is interested they can definitely let me know and I can compile a list.

[medkidblog]

PG? What are the options?

Wow, this is probably one of the biggest concerns for anyone who’s finished MBBS or is soon to be done with it. Unless maybe if you’ve already booked a seat somewhere and the mundane worries of the rest of us plebeians are not your concern.

But apart from those people, most of us have this worry about going into residency since just an MBBS degree isn’t enough to garner patients and or get long term employment. After all there’s a limit to how long you can work as a non-academic junior resident without actually getting a Masters.

With a lot of countries restricting the entry of foreign medical students into their residency programs, there are pretty much only two viable choices left to students right out of MBBS who don’t have a permanent residency abroad. These are- the USA and Germany.

Of course everyone knows about the USMLE and its “Steps”. Germany though is a lot more complicated in that the rules are different from state to state within the country, which makes getting a residency a lot like applying for a job where you have to convince the hospital and department that you are the best choice among the many applying.

What I feel is that if someone doesn’t really want to stay in India for the rest of their lives, has enough money to last a year or so before getting a job, and the tenacity to go put themselves out there and get a residency, and can learn the language, Germany is definitely a great choice. While residencies are much longer (twice as long as in India) the work load, and quality of life is significantly better.

Otherwise, of course there are the NEET-PG and DNB exams closer home which are famously tough to “crack” and insanely limited compared to the number of undergraduate medical seats there are.

Still there is a continuous rise in the number of seats available each year, and if the NMC (National Medical Commission) bill is passed there will be an even larger number of seats available at both the UG and PG levels.

After considering all my options, I have still made the decision to stay in India and do a Medical residency in a government college (have you even see the fees in private colleges?! Ain’t no one got cash for dat!)

If anyone has questions please go ahead and send me a message or reply to this post. I’ll be happy to start a conversation!

[medkidblog]

Dissection Hall Turned Court

Attendance is such a huge issue in private medical colleges it's almost hilarious. Except it's not. At all. Because people get “remanded” and it’s not fun to take exams 6 months after the rest of your batch.

It just so happened hunt one day a bunch of students clamored around Arjun ji, the Attendance/Bone Guy, to get their attendance marked even before he had gotten through all the roll numbers. The next natural step to take was for him to complain to our professor and in the next five minutes we found ourselves confronted by one of the oldest female professors with Arjun Ji, a grown man, standing behind her looking like the most professional tattle tale in a 3rd grade class.

It was mildly shocking to see a grown man acting like a primary school student because he couldn't handle a bunch of kids trying to get their attendance marked. After a slight scolding we got to sit back down and continued to learn about the hindgut through diagrams we will "never find in anywhere else because [she] drew them herself."

Little did we know the when we would got to the Dissection Hall, one of those new professors who had a lot to prove would make us stand for half an hour as "punishment," "shor machane ke liye" [for making too much noise.] Then as soon as the other professors entered Arjun Ji complained about us again (because he obviously did not find a senior professor's reprimand satisfying enough for his extremely fragile ego.) Soon enough each row of punished MBBS students was asked to stand up and present their notes from Embryology as proof of having been in class, just to make sure we didn't get "proxy-ed." When that didn't yield any results, they asked the Biochemistry department for their attendance sheet from first period. Whether or not the biochem department actually gave in to their ridiculousness, I don't know but after lecturing us on the issues we'll face if we're ever caught "kisi aur ki proxy lagate hue," [getting anyone else proxy-ed] they finally let us sit after three-quarters of an hour.

Now I'm not sure about the others but I felt as if I'd just witnessed someone's CID fantasy play out in DH because honestly the way we were being investigated was totally unnecessary especially considering that they they ultimately didn't find anyone who was getting their proxy done. Because most people (including myself) had never gone through such an ordeal over such a simple matter of attendance, we were naturally horrified that we could be treated like criminals in a professional course. Especially those who had been "wrongly accused" because they didn't care for things like note taking. What we all were thinking was why we were being treated as school students instead of university students in one of the most prestigious courses in the country. Was it because we deserved it? Or because getting proxy's was actually that huge of an offense? Or was it simply because one of our professors dreamt of being a criminal investigator after years of growing up watching CID, but couldn’t become one because of societal pressures and was now taking her chance to become ACP Pradhyuman just that one time by eliminating the suspects of the Embryo-proxy-Lagao case?

[themedicalchronicles]

Why Doctors Should Be More Empathetic--But Not Too Much More: Scientific American

Research is revealing what goes on in the brains of health care workers when they see patients as objects

If possible, think back to a time you or a loved one had to be in a hospital for a significant amount of time. What do you remember from the experience?

Many people report an eerie feeling about their stays in hospitals. Even if everyone treating you was kind, attentive, hard working, efficient and competent, you may still have had a sense that—compared to other situations in which people were intensely looking after you—something was different about being in the hospital. With all the measuring, palpating, listening for abnormal body sounds, injecting, and imaging of your innards, you may have felt treated like a kind of object, rather than a complete person. You may have felt, in a word, dehumanized.

Dehumanization is generally a negative state of affairs. Few patients like to be objectified, and when in a hospital, most desire empathy from their caregivers. It is for these reasons that the regular reaction to dehumanization in medicine is to condemn it outright. The medical establishment regularly institutes various forms of empathy-awareness programs.

A curious observer might ask a more basic question: why is a lack of empathy a perennial problem in clinical settings in the first place? Why the perpetual need for empathy education? Certainly not every profession has these hurdles, nor requires such measures.

Recent research on how medical professionals’ brains function sheds light on these questions. Specifically, two experiments by Jean Decety and colleagues of the University of Chicago have examined the neuroscientific basis of pain empathy in physicians.

In one experiment, physicians who practice acupuncture (as well as matched non-physician controls) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching videos of needles being inserted into another person’s hands, feet and areas around their mouth as well as videos of the same areas being touched by a cotton bud. Compared to controls, the physicians showed significantly less response in brain regions involved in empathy for pain. In addition, the physicians showed significantly greater activation of areas involved in executive control, self-regulation and thinking about the mental states of others.  The physicians appeared to show less empathy and more of a higher-level cognitive response.

This finding raised a further question. Perceiving pain in others typically involves two steps. First people engage in the emotional sharing of pain with another person, and then they make a cognitive appraisal of the emotion. Do physicians automatically feel empathy for the pain of others, but then quickly suppress it? Or is the cognitive suppression of empathy even deeper; has it become more automatic? Is it possible that the physicians no longer even experience the first step of empathy for pain that regular people show on their brain scans?

The investigators repeated the same experiment but rather than looking for changes in brain blood-flow by using fMRI, they assessed the brain’s event-related potentials (ERP). Results showed that when viewing the painful needle sticking, the physicians did not even show the early empathy response. The physicians had apparently become so good at empathy suppression that there was no early response to worry about.

Why might these effects exist? It could be that, compared to other professions, the people that gravitate to healthcare tend to be less empathic. This seems unlikely. Furthermore, studies of physicians show that they are often the most empathic and caring towards the beginning of medical school, and that they become steadily less empathetic with more clinical training. The more likely culprits are therefore the nature of medical training and the intrinsic demands of the profession.

[medkidblog]

So, I just watched the new Grey’s Anatomy episode (12x05) and I was suddenly reminded of Derek’s death in a way I’d rather not.

To backtrack a bit, Derek’s death some time during my revision period for my first professional examinations. It was already a period of extreme stress when I had no idea how I was supposed to be studying and whether I would make it through the exams at all. And then comes the brilliant Derek Shepherd who thinks “I’m going to die because these people aren’t properly trained.”

The moment I heard those words I started crying. I didn’t cry for the character, or his wife, or their relationship, or the show’s history. I cried for myself because in that moment all my insecurities about being a terrible student came out with this one sentence and I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was terrified that I wouldn’t make a good doctor.

The funny thing is that since I’ve joined Med School I haven’t given much thought to what sort of doctor I’ll be, what sort of principles I’d live by. I didn’t think about the fact that I’d be in charge of patient’s lives even though we often joked about some people killing patients if they ever became doctors.

I’m not going to admit that I’m the best student in my class, nor that I remember everything I learnt from first year because I don’t. But whenever think back to how I felt in that moment when I was quite literally wailing in front of my computer screen I remind myself that I can’t let myself feel that way again.

Luckily, I haven’t so far. At least not to that extent because doubt is something that never leaves me, and I hope it doesn’t because it forces me to reevaluate my life and the situation I’m in. It’s sort of made me more serious towards my studies. We’ve also started hospital postings so that reinforces just how little we actually know and how much more there is to learn.

The point of writing this and also of this blog is to write my completely honest thoughts as a medical student. And I guess that what I’ve learnt is that even a show about fake doctors can effect real ones.