Saturday, December 8, 2007

Most physicians who go into family medicine prefer it to internal medicine because you really get to know your patients better, and you get to see what's going on with them long term and how things progress for them. It seems to me it's kind of the opposite in med school on rotations.
In my family practice rotations, I would meet patients once because I'm only there for a month, and I only saw a few of them a second time (usually the unfortunate ones). On my IM rotation, I see the same patients every day until they leave the hospital. With the post-op patients, that means I see them like 3-5 times. With the acute patients I see them at least twice. So I get to know people and see how their health issues get resolved.
That's my two cents for the day.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

NPO after midnight or you'll turn into a gremlin!

I'm so not a morning person, however, I've gotten use to waking up super early (4ish, which is ungodly early for me). I've gotten use to having to answer questions for attendings at 6 a.m. Going to bed at 9 p.m. is fine now. But I still feel bad every time I walk into a hospital room at 5 a.m. and wake somebody up to ask them questions like "have you passed gas yet?" Maybe it will encourage people to get well quicker so they don't have to deal with med students asking questions about their bodily functions the minute they're jolted into reality.