Anatomy: Block or longitudinal?

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stoutt

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As i've been on the interview trail one of the main difference between several schools I have seen is whether anatomy is taken as a big block at the beginning of M1 or whether it is longitudinal throughout the preclinical years. For all you med students out there, which way do you think is better? It seems that the benefit of having anatomy as a block format is that its a good basis for the preclinical years and it is nice to just get it out of the way. However, longitudinal anatomy seems to make more sense regarding correlating the relavent anatomy to whatever organ system you are studying throughout M1 & M2. Thoughts?
 
stoutt said:
As i've been on the interview trail one of the main difference between several schools I have seen is whether anatomy is taken as a big block at the beginning of M1 or whether it is longitudinal throughout the preclinical years. For all you med students out there, which way do you think is better? It seems that the benefit of having anatomy as a block format is that its a good basis for the preclinical years and it is nice to just get it out of the way. However, longitudinal anatomy seems to make more sense regarding correlating the relavent anatomy to whatever organ system you are studying throughout M1 & M2. Thoughts?
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I had block anatomy. It sucked, but I'm glad it's out of the way and you really get to immerse yourself in the subject. I don't know about every school, but mine does specialized anatomy throughout the relevant systems-based blocks. It's not as though you'll never see anatomy again.
 
Doesn't matter. I had block and as said above preferred to be able to focus on it for a short period of time then never have to pick fat off a cadaver ever again.
 
It won't matter unless you are unable to adjust to different learning styles.

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TheMightySmiter said:
I had block anatomy. It sucked, but I'm glad it's out of the way and you really get to immerse yourself in the subject. I don't know about every school, but mine does specialized anatomy throughout the relevant systems-based blocks. It's not as though you'll never see anatomy again.
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This is how my girlfriend's school is and most of her classmates that I've talked to thought it prepared them well for step 1.

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I'm an M1 taking longitudinal anatomy and I think it would've been easier for me to get better grades if I was taking it in a single block. Every anatomy exam we take is cumulative, including our very last exam in February (and we started anatomy late July!) I already have a hard time remembering all the details from the first couple of labs right now :scared: There's a difference between having to remember stuff from 6 weeks ago and having to remember stuff from 6 months ago.

However, in the long run I think longitudinal anatomy will be more beneficial for my learning. In my opinion, it's easier to learn anatomy when it's placed in the context of physiology and embryology. I'm also hoping it will be less painful to review anatomy for Step 1 since I've been forced to continuously study it over the course of 6 months. I would imagine it would be more difficult if you got anatomy over with in the first 6-8 weeks of school and then never studied it in detail again until Step 1.
 
I had longitudinal, and I thought it was a good system.

It was much more relevant to connect lecture and lab and I thought it helped me learn it better. Though doing anatomy for 6 months or so is annoying.

I think it is a better system, and our school does very well on the anatomy shelf. However, anatomy is pretty low yield for the rest of med school, so this isn't something to get too excited about (unless you love anatomy).
 
Wouldn't the point of block anatomy be so that when you hit other things later on, you are already familiar with the basic anatomy of the system you are looking at? Maybe this is like the block anatomy + systems based longitudinal anatomy.
 
Bangersandmash said:
Wouldn't the point of block anatomy be so that when you hit other things later on, you are already familiar with the basic anatomy of the system you are looking at? Maybe this is like the block anatomy + systems based longitudinal anatomy.
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If you actually remember all of the details, yes, that's the theory.
 
I think it in part also depends how it is evaluated/graded.

It sounds like some of the above posters have longitudinal anatomy w/ a grade that accumulates over the course of the entire year. We have longitudinal anatomy for which we are tested on the relevant anatomy in a separate gross practical (usually after the written exam) w/ each organ system & the score counts as part of your overall grade for the system. Accordingly, if you suck at anatomy, it takes a lot of the pressure off -- for instance, in Repro, anatomy was 25%, so I could get 0% on my anatomy practical & still pass Repro. If we had block anatomy at the beginning of the year, I think many people would be at greater risk of failing (at least w/ the way we are tested).
 
I don't mind anatomy lab itself, but prefer the single block because of the smell alone. I doubt there is significant benefit doing it one way or the other.
 
By the end of block anatomy, I was getting stress-induced migraines and was unable to fall asleep because I couldn't stop thinking about muscle attachments and cranial nerve diagrams. But the feeling I got when I knew I passed was amazing. The biggest sense of relief I've ever felt. And then the next unit was molecular bio, so angels sang to me from the heavens those next two weeks post-anatomy.
 
TheMightySmiter said:
By the end of block anatomy, I was getting stress-induced migraines and was unable to fall asleep because I couldn't stop thinking about muscle attachments and cranial nerve diagrams. But the feeling I got when I knew I passed was amazing. The biggest sense of relief I've ever felt. And then the next unit was molecular bio, so angels sang to me from the heavens those next two weeks post-anatomy.
Click to expand...

I remember during the first week of anatomy I was actually unable to fall asleep because random anatomy terms and facts kept popping into my mind. That had never happened before (and fortunately never happened again).

tl;dr anatomy blows.
 
NickNaylor said:
I remember during the first week of anatomy I was actually unable to fall asleep because random anatomy terms and facts kept popping into my mind. That had never happened before (and fortunately never happened again).

tl;dr anatomy blows.
Click to expand...

Isn't anatomy low-yield for step 1? Also, I heard that shelfs barely use anatomy.... so, why is anatomy important?
 
Agent B said:
Isn't anatomy low-yield for step 1? Also, I heard that shelfs barely use anatomy.... so, why is anatomy important?
Click to expand...

My understanding is that it's pretty low-yield. Unless, of course, you're a surgeon. Then anatomy becomes pretty important.

Medical school is training you to become a stem cell: you're taught more knowledge than you'll ever need in any field (and, by the way, leaving a lot of field-specific knowledge out) because you need to have at least a basic knowledge of every field in order to function on rotations. As you "differentiate" (i.e., become more specialized as your training continues), most of the knowledge you learned fades because you simply don't use it. The stuff that you DO use will become drilled in your brain, along with the very specific, nitty-gritty stuff that you were never exposed to in the pre-clinical curriculum. Thus, even though you likely won't use most of that knowledge (including anatomy), the thinking is that you should at least be exposed to it. And the reality is that if you DID know all of that stuff, I think you would likely be a better diagnostician since you would be able to synthesize clinical findings more effectively to some extent. Unfortunately there's only so much you can learn and remember, though.

At least that's my take on med school and medicine thus far.
 
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