Chapter 9 : Can I be a good clinician ( 5 )

9.5 How do I correlate the basic science and the clinical?

This is something that many students have difficulty in doing. This is because it is a painful process for most people to go back to the books which they have covered one or two years earlier. However, if one is conscientious ad sincerely wants to master a subject, then there is no short cut but to look back and revise what one has learnt and forgotten to enable one to understand further on the subject.

Speaking from personal experience, I used to have so many books in front of me in the library while trying to understand the pathology of an organ. Reading the anatomy and the physiology of the organ such as the kidney, in order to understand the pathology and why it causes renal failure in a patient that one sees in the ward is extremely helpful.

I tried to find the explanation of all the symptoms that the patient showed based on the pathology that occurred at the cellular level. Having done this, it helped me to retain the most essential facts about renal failure and has helped me along my medical career. Of course it is painstaking but it is a worthwhile step to take.

You should see it as a long-term investment with long-term benefits. If you take the short cut by remembering the symptoms just for the sake of the medical examination only to forget it later, this will affect your preparation for your final exam, where you will find that you probably need to read the symptoms again. This, in turn will encroach into the time allocated for reading a new subject.

 

You will waste your valuable time as you are doing things twice because you did not do it well the first time.

This is what knowledge really is. It is finding out something for oneself with pain, with joy, with exultancy, with labour and with all the the little ticking, breathing moments of our lives, until it is ours as that only is ours which is rooted in the structure of our lives.

Thomas Wolfe ( 1900-1938 )

(How to become a good & successful medical student; Muhaya Hj Mohamad)