The past few weeks: two tests, and a lot of clinical exposure

The past few weeks have been busy - the status quo in medical school. I got through two more Molecules to Medicine tests (biostatistics and genetics), but more significantly, I've gotten a lot of clinical exposure.

My very first patient ever was at Warren Village, a two year old boy whose mother was concerned about recurring ear infections. A classmate and I teamed up for the interview and physical exam, which worked out well considering how nervous I felt. But somehow I muddled my way through it, and now every patient encounter is easier and easier insofar as I have prior experience to draw on. I have gone into Warren Village two more times since then and will talk in more detail about those experiences in a later post.

I've also gained some clinical experience through my preceptor. This is a program that matches medical students with a community physician with the aim of setting up a long-term (2-3 years) mentoring relationship. There is a wide range of preceptorship experiences that depend on factors like the setting, specialty, and the individual who is doing the mentoring. Typically, preceptors are in some sort of general practice like family medicine, pediatrics, emergency medicine, or internal medicine. My preceptor is boarded in both family and emergency medicine but does occupational health at Kaiser. I'll talk more about that in a later post.

Two other clinical experiences that also deserve their own dedicated posts are: 1) shadowing a senior resident in the ER, and 2) Clinica Tepeyac.

So many of the older doctors reminiscing about their medical school experiences recount how they never even saw a patient until their third year when they started clinical rotations. I feel incredibly lucky to have these clinical opportunities now, during my first two years of medical school, which are traditionally reserved for cramming as much information as humanly possible into the heads of poor medical students. Pairing together the classroom and the clinic is, in my view, a positive evolution of medical education.