Showing posts with label medical school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical school. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Ninja scribes

We have ninja scribes in our department. 
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These are young, eager premeds who follow our attendings from room to room and maniacally type H&Ps into electronic notes on COWs.  They are dressed in all black scrubs, as not to confuse them with the healthcare providers.  They listen to resident presentations and type as we speak. They type the medical decision making of the attending as it occurs in real time.  The ninjas transcribe the EKG and radiology results as the attending dictates their own thoughts into the air.  The ninja-notes can be accessed at any time so the the attending can use them to tighten up official notes.
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I am jealous of these ninjas.
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Ninja Scribe, dressed in black


Why?
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They are getting an extremely high quality premedical education.  I know of no higher.  One ninja tells me that she will see over 700 patients before applying to med school.  She will see 700 cases from chief complaint to disposition and will watch an expert level thinker work up every single one of them.  Before she even starts medical school, she will observe more patients being treated than most of her classmates will see before they graduate med school.  She will have the best H&P skills in her med school, she will have a solid framework to make the preclinical science stick, and she will understand what it is to practice clinical medicine before she attempts to do it herself.
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I wish I had been a ninja.  I'd be a much better resident.
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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Prezi

The worst lectures are those with PowerPoint slides cluttered with bullet points and words.  Why even get in front of a crowd and speak if everything you are going to say is already on the slides?  Less clutter means more attention to the the speaker.  The best lectures are those that tell a story.

Try Prezi when creating your next presentation.  I played with it last night after a shift, and was able to easily turn earlier blog posts (Venn and 3 Tenets) into a cool presentation.  If I want to teach someone about my ideas, I can easily go on to my Prezi account and use this as my storyboard to explain myself.  


Friday, January 6, 2012

Free EM Ultrasound Lessons 1 - 5 Now Posted

The purpose of this free "course" is for it to continually improved.  I have contributed absolutely no content, but simply arranged free resources in a logical manner.  It takes 10 minutes to set up the course for yourself.  And each lesson ranges from 1 to 2 hours.
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Lesson 1 through 4 are cardiac, aorta, ruq, and renal/ureter/bladder.  Lesson 5 is a review of what you've learned.  The next lesson will be FAST, which you will be able to perform well now that you have knowledge of all 4 views.
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I can't possibly know what all the free resources out there are.  So please comment and contribute and help others teach themselves how to be better at ultrasound.  I'm particularly interested in ultrasound videos that clinically correlate so that we can improve our practice and knowledge base of EM, not just ultrasound.
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I look forward to this project evolving and thank you in advance for all of your help.  A special thanks to Tarina Kang, ultrasound director at Beth Israel - Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency for supporting this vision.

Find the course here: http://teachmd.blogspot.com/p/free-ed-ultrasound.html
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Teach, MD

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Free Emergency Medicine Ultrasound "Course"

EM ultrasound is difficult to learn by using books with text and static images.  I’m just finishing a quick week of introductory ultrasound in which the interns walk around the department with a senior resident or attending and free-scan patients.  You can’t learn ultrasound without doing it.  But, going home and reviewing the images you saw and reading about the specifics in static books seems backwards to me.  So, I decided to learn mostly by videos/images and short directed articles.

I've also been thinking a lot about crowdsourcing lately.  As a resident, I don't have time for much else besides medicine and my loved ones.  So how does a busy person take big ideas and make them into reality?  By soliciting the help of a crowd of experts.  

At BIDMC/HAEMR, a fellow resident and I set up an internal site on our resident-wiki page where residents post info to help one another out in our EM learning.  I started collecting the links of all the ultrasound videos I watched this week in order to post them onto this site.  But, I realized that the crowd of ultrasound learners could be much larger than just the 36 other residents at my program.

So I've begun to design a free ultrasound course.  I've posted the first 3 lessons (cardiac, aorta, and GB/RUQ), and as I continue to learn ultrasound, I will post more lessons.  

I am in no way an expert on ultrasound, so I'll need your help to crowdsource this project.  Please comment to this post, and contribute your own videos/sites/podcasts/apps/etc, and I’ll update the “course” appropriately.

Note: I have no affiliation with any of the resources that I posted.  If I ever do, I'll be sure to disclose it.  If you post a resource that you are affiliated with, please let us know that as well.

- Teach, MD