Anatomy Without Dissection ...

[JDovers]

Yo! I'm heading to UAB in the fall for medical school, and they've announced that anatomy will no longer be dissection based, but instead will be mostly be prosections given by the faculty.

Thoughts from the grizzled vets? Good thing, bad thing, who cares thing?

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[psipsina]

My last block of anatomy I got really sick, two ER visits and a couple day hospitalization over two weeks, anyway I missed most of the dissection for that block and I had to take my finals late. The proffs left two "prosected" (by my classmates) cadavers for me to study on for my practical, anyway I only spent about 6 hours with the bodies and I got the highest practical grade of the semester without the endless fat removal that is cadaver dissection. There is something to say for the bonding experience and the confronting of death and the cadaver being your first patient and all that but after a few weeks it really just becomes a dreaded chore that makes you smell funny rather than a learning experience. I think prosections are where medicine is headed once we all let go of the nostalgia for the anatomy lab experience, because it is a pretty low efficiency use of time in a system that is cramming more and more knowledge into the same two preclinical years.

 

[Anka]

I learned a lot by doing it myself, but not everyone does; I have a hard time staring at something without fussing with it. If you learn a lot by doing it yourself, then you'll suffer from not doing the dissection; if you fall among the majority who get nothing from the experience, then the UAB model is the way to go.

Anka

 

[78222]

I learned a lot, I think it was definitely beneficial for me to be the one doing the dissection. However, not everyone learns that way.

 

[Tired Pigeon]

I learned SO MUCH from the actual experience of dissecting. It was completely awesome & I'm bummed it's over. I would hate using prosections only.

Thats just my 0.02, though. YMMV.

 

[naegleria brain]

basically, wanna-be surgeons would hate it. wanna-be others would love it. the rest can go 50/50.

i loved it. i had a really obese woman; we assigned someone to fat detail each week and it worked out pretty well.

i liked it for all the surgeries though. my woman had bilateral TKA's so that was sweet. the one next to me was a hermaphrodite! prosections won't give you that sort of excitement.

 

[anon-y-mouse]

My last block of anatomy I got really sick, two ER visits and a couple day hospitalization over two weeks, anyway I missed most of the dissection for that block and I had to take my finals late. The proffs left two "prosected" (by my classmates) cadavers for me to study on for my practical, anyway I only spent about 6 hours with the bodies and I got the highest practical grade of the semester without the endless fat removal that is cadaver dissection. There is something to say for the bonding experience and the confronting of death and the cadaver being your first patient and all that but after a few weeks it really just becomes a dreaded chore that makes you smell funny rather than a learning experience. I think prosections are where medicine is headed once we all let go of the nostalgia for the anatomy lab experience, because it is a pretty low efficiency use of time in a system that is cramming more and more knowledge into the same two preclinical years.

Great. Your argument proves jack ****. Spending 6 hours with a prosected body to "do well on a lab practical"?? Anyone can do that, and I'm sure I would have done as well with just 1 hour since I have a great visual memory. However, such learning isn't really long term. What are you in medical school for? To learn about the human body in order to be a good doctor or to binge/purge in order to pass tests? The fact that you did better on the "6 hour crammed prosection" as compared to the thorough dissections does NOT in itself support the superiority of prosection in terms of actual long-term learning; perhaps you didn't do as well in "traditional" anatomy lab sessions because you didn't take enough initiative or weren't active enough in your learning?

I got a whole lot out of anatomy lab, just because I made sure to read up on the dissections, watch the necessary video pre-prep, plan out what I'd be seeing, quiz and teach my labmates (in a non-gunnerly fashion), etc. etc. and that stuff is pretty much still with me, and I'd be able to refresh the knowledge fairly quickly if I needed to.

Different goals, different strokes.

It's unfortunate that UAB is going the full prosection way... my anatomy professor told me that at a recent anatomy symposium, anatomy professors discussed this several years ago, implemented it, had less success, and have now come back full circle to "traditional" methods.

 

[AmoryBlaine]

Few thoughts..

1. No one can really evaluate which is better unless you were able to do them both starting from scratch.

2. I think students "interested in surgery" grossly (pun intended) overestimate the importance of dissection. I rocked anatomy but what helps you on you surgery clerkship is the knowledge, not the dissection skills. Maybe if we all dissected with Kochers and Bovies we'd be surgical studs.

3. Anatomy is one of the more wasteful classes in med school time-wise. This is something that the NBME has already figured out. It is very important to know the path of the subclavian and to have a general idea about the blood supply to the gut. The ansa cervicalis, maybe not so much.

4. Fat-picking is not a learning activity. Neither is "cleaning."

5. If they really cared about our clinical anatomy knowledge, med schools would turn Gross Anatomy into a class that was 40-50% radiology.

 

[njbmd]

Dissection in Gross Anatomy teaches dissection skills as well as anatomical skills. There is nothing about dissection of a preserved anatomical specimen that will enhance your surgical skills (I am a surgeon). If your medical school has decided that medical students no longer need dissection skills then they have likely found other methods of teaching you anatomical skills.

Being able to locate structures in the human body is not about dissection but more about visualization in 3-dimensions and ability to recognize landmarks. After all, most of us learned quite a bit about embryology without ever dissecting an embryo.

I do not think that your medical education will suffer from learning Gross Anatomy without dissection as long as you have structures to study.

 

[southerncomfort]

Great. Your argument proves jack ****. Spending 6 hours with a prosected body to "do well on a lab practical"?? Anyone can do that, and I'm sure I would have done as well with just 1 hour since I have a great visual memory. However, such learning isn't really long term. What are you in medical school for? To learn about the human body in order to be a good doctor or to binge/purge in order to pass tests? The fact that you did better on the "6 hour crammed prosection" as compared to the thorough dissections does NOT in itself support the superiority of prosection in terms of actual long-term learning; perhaps you didn't do as well in "traditional" anatomy lab sessions because you didn't take enough initiative or weren't active enough in your learning?

I got a whole lot out of anatomy lab, just because I made sure to read up on the dissections, watch the necessary video pre-prep, plan out what I'd be seeing, quiz and teach my labmates (in a non-gunnerly fashion), etc. etc. and that stuff is pretty much still with me, and I'd be able to refresh the knowledge fairly quickly if I needed to.

Different goals, different strokes.

It's unfortunate that UAB is going the full prosection way... my anatomy professor told me that at a recent anatomy symposium, anatomy professors discussed this several years ago, implemented it, had less success, and have now come back full circle to "traditional" methods.

That's rather harsh. And being a classmate of psipsina, I think she's one of the last people you would suggest didn't "take enough initiative" or wasn't "active enough" in learning. To use your own words, that is jack****

Not every minute of anatomy dissection is a learning experience. A lot of it is the technical aspect of making a clean dissection.
FWIW, our second year class had prosections only for their anatomy lab and did not have practicals. Did it affect their learning? That'll be shown in their USMLE and surgery rotations in the coming months, but knowing our faculty, I get the impression they learned what they needed to learn.

 

[78222]

Few thoughts..

1. No one can really evaluate which is better unless you were able to do them both starting from scratch.

Don't we all sort of learn both ways? I mean, I didn't dissect everyday, so I can compare that to the days I did dissect.

2. I think students "interested in surgery" grossly (pun intended) overestimate the importance of dissection. I rocked anatomy but what helps you on you surgery clerkship is the knowledge, not the dissection skills. Maybe if we all dissected with Kochers and Bovies we'd be surgical studs

Again, I personally felt that on the days I did dissect, I learned a lot more than on the days I didn't. Also, actually seeing it helped with my relational anatomy - and helped me better identify where a nerve or artery would be. I assisted on a surgery a few weeks back, and while it was way different from anatomy, I feel that anatomy lab helped me relationally.

.

3. Anatomy is one of the more wasteful classes in med school time-wise. This is something that the NBME has already figured out. It is very important to know the path of the subclavian and to have a general idea about the blood supply to the gut. The ansa cervicalis, maybe not so much.

I think the time wasting comes from the fact that you have to learn a million irrelevent details that you will never in a million years remember.

4. Fat-picking is not a learning activity. Neither is "cleaning."

Preach it!

5. If they really cared about our clinical anatomy knowledge, med schools would turn Gross Anatomy into a class that was 40-50% radiology.

We did have radiology in gross lab, they were on the practical exam. It probably should have been more radiology heavy (and fewer stupid cross sections), but it was included.

 

[logos]

I think anatomy would be fine with prosections. Dissection didnt really teach me much anyway. Perhaps the only thing I got from actually disecting was a sense of the strength and consistency of various tissues.

 

[psipsina]

Great. Your argument proves jack ****. Spending 6 hours with a prosected body to "do well on a lab practical"?? Anyone can do that, and I'm sure I would have done as well with just 1 hour since I have a great visual memory. However, such learning isn't really long term. What are you in medical school for? To learn about the human body in order to be a good doctor or to binge/purge in order to pass tests? The fact that you did better on the "6 hour crammed prosection" as compared to the thorough dissections does NOT in itself support the superiority of prosection in terms of actual long-term learning; perhaps you didn't do as well in "traditional" anatomy lab sessions because you didn't take enough initiative or weren't active enough in your learning?

I got a whole lot out of anatomy lab, just because I made sure to read up on the dissections, watch the necessary video pre-prep, plan out what I'd be seeing, quiz and teach my labmates (in a non-gunnerly fashion), etc. etc. and that stuff is pretty much still with me, and I'd be able to refresh the knowledge fairly quickly if I needed to.

Different goals, different strokes.

It's unfortunate that UAB is going the full prosection way... my anatomy professor told me that at a recent anatomy symposium, anatomy professors discussed this several years ago, implemented it, had less success, and have now come back full circle to "traditional" methods.

Wow, way to make assumptions dude. I learned everything really well while I was in the hospital by studying netters and aclands videos etc, and then it only took me about 6 hours to go in and correlate it to the 3D spatial relationships that a cadaver can teach you (when I didn't have to dig thru fat etc to uncover the 3D relationships). I'm actually going into surgery and my performance in anatomy prompted my proffessors to offer to help me start making connections. My final practical was oral with me and two proffessors standing over the cadavers basically being pimped for a grade. I didn't just look at a tag and write something down that I had memorized, I actually had to demonstrate a deeper understanding than on any normal practical. I actually really liked dissection and tended to be quite the scalpel hog, I just thought that the prosections were a more efficient use of time especially since the future surgeons would still get hands on in the surgical antatomy course later on.

 

[psipsina]

That's rather harsh. And being a classmate of psipsina, I think she's one of the last people you would suggest didn't "take enough initiative" or wasn't "active enough" in learning. To use your own words, that is jack****

Not every minute of anatomy dissection is a learning experience. A lot of it is the technical aspect of making a clean dissection.
FWIW, our second year class had prosections only for their anatomy lab and did not have practicals. Did it affect their learning? That'll be shown in their USMLE and surgery rotations in the coming months, but knowing our faculty, I get the impression they learned what they needed to learn.

Thanks for havin my back girl

 

[DrDrew]

I've been a Teaching Assistant for a Prosection course for the last three years, and have also helped to run a Gross course using 100% prosected bodies the last two years.

I can tell you that the knowledge that students pick up using prosections is MUCH more "high yield" than doing the dissection. Also, students can do prosecting if they would like. This allows those who want to learn more about fascial layers and a different view on the anatomy the chance to.

Also to note is the fact that using prosection, bodies can be used for 2-3 years, this means that the gross course gives students 50-70 bodies (with many different levels shown) to use to see a greater array and understand how prevalent anatomical variation is.

 

[AmoryBlaine]

Don't we all sort of learn both ways? I mean, I didn't dissect everyday, so I can compare that to the days I did dissect.



Again, I personally felt that on the days I did dissect, I learned a lot more than on the days I didn't. Also, actually seeing it helped with my relational anatomy - and helped me better identify where a nerve or artery would be. I assisted on a surgery a few weeks back, and while it was way different from anatomy, I feel that anatomy lab helped me relationally.

.
I think the time wasting comes from the fact that you have to learn a million irrelevent details that you will never in a million years remember.



Preach it!



We did have radiology in gross lab, they were on the practical exam. It probably should have been more radiology heavy (and fewer stupid cross sections), but it was included.

Anatomy should probably have much more cross-sectional learning. CT scan anyone?

 

[AmoryBlaine]

Wow, way to make assumptions dude. I learned everything really well while I was in the hospital by studying netters and aclands videos etc, and then it only took me about 6 hours to go in and correlate it to the 3D spatial relationships that a cadaver can teach you (when I didn't have to dig thru fat etc to uncover the 3D relationships). I'm actually going into surgery and my performance in anatomy prompted my proffessors to offer to help me start making connections. My final practical was oral with me and two proffessors standing over the cadavers basically being pimped for a grade. I didn't just look at a tag and write something down that I had memorized, I actually had to demonstrate a deeper understanding than on any normal practical. I actually really liked dissection and tended to be quite the scalpel hog, I just thought that the prosections were a more efficient use of time especially since the future surgeons would still get hands on in the surgical antatomy course later on.

What happened to EM?

 

[JohnUC33]

Yo! I'm heading to UAB in the fall for medical school, and they've announced that anatomy will no longer be dissection based, but instead will be mostly be prosections given by the faculty.

Thoughts from the grizzled vets? Good thing, bad thing, who cares thing?

By dissecting with my own hands, there are some parts of the human body that I will never forget, especially those nerves and arteries that took me hours to find!

 

[psipsina]

What happened to EM?

I love EM but I always want to leave with the patients whenever they are turfed to surgery. I'm actually thinking about trauma surg as being a happy compromise and am shadowing someone over the summer to check it out. EM is about the only non surg thing I have any true interest in but I think I might struggle with letting go of my patients before they are fixed.

 

[psipsina]

Anatomy should probably have much more cross-sectional learning. CT scan anyone?

I think my school had good emphasis on radiology. We had x-rays, CTs and cross sections on each anatomy practical and when I later went into a clinical setting for a preceptorship I could acutally look at things and make intelligent guesses as to what was going on. I really thought the cross sections were useful.

 

[Scoot]

Yo! I'm heading to UAB in the fall for medical school, and they've announced that anatomy will no longer be dissection based, but instead will be mostly be prosections given by the faculty.

Thoughts from the grizzled vets? Good thing, bad thing, who cares thing?

FANTASTIC IDEA. Student dissection is a waste of time and only exists as a hazing ritual.

 

[mudphudwannabe]

I think having a prosection class is a great idea. I found hours in the anatomy lab to be totally exhausting with very little reward. I'm pretty sure this was the source of my funk first year -- I felt like I was wasting this "great opportunity."

We split up the dissection -- each group of 8 students is assigned one cadaver, but the group of 8 is split in 2 groups of 4. Each group of 4 does half the dissections, then they teach to the other group that didn't do the dissection. Of course everyone can spend as much time in the lab as they like, but I felt that I learned just as well on the "teaching" dissections as I did on the ones where I was there for the whole dissection. There were parts where we studied prosections, and I felt like this took a lot of the pressure off. I could just relax and learn without having to worry about ruining something, or the constant question, "Is this _____ or just a lump of fascia?"

Perhaps there could be an option to dissect for those students who are really interested. From what I can tell, it is a small but vocal minority who really enjoy dissection and learn from that process.

 

[Biscuit799]

FANTASTIC IDEA. Student dissection is a waste of time and only exists as a hazing ritual.

I will agree that 75% of your time in anatomy lab is fairly useless skinning, digging through fat/fascia, or looking for pointless nerves. But that being said, there are a couple areas of anatomy where I wouldn't have learned nearly as well were it not for dissection. The pharynx jumps to mind, as does the pelvic floor. These areas were tough for me to get a handle on exactly how they worked. For this reason alone, I'd say the education you end up with at the end of anatomy is infinitely more valuable with a dissection.

 

[naegleria brain]

our school had both, come to think of it. of course, i was an idiot and didn't know what "prosection" meant for a solid month.

when i did figure it out, i'd spend the first half of lab dissecting and learning, then going to the prosection for confirmation. then went back and looked for the rest. i thought that was aweomse

 

[c diddy]

I forgot the exact title, but there is a cd rom of actual cadaver dissections that is excellent. In the time it takes you to dissect the forearm you can go through that cd's forearm chapter and read chung both 20 times over (literally). Let's face it, after about 2-3 months those cadavers look basically like beef jerky and distinguishing an artery from a vein from a nerve is practically imposssible. You need to know what is supposed to be where, and the significance of the structure. Gross anatomy lab is a fun experience initially, but time is your most precious asset in med school. those 2-3 hour labs could turn into one hour of cd rom and chung, plus one hour of exercise and another for a relaxed dinner. Maybe consider attending a lab per week, and spend the rest of your time doing high yield studying. (As you might tell I am not a surgeon)

 

[MadameLULU]

I rarely dissected, and when I did, I didn't learn a thing. Prosections were great. My friends and I would pimp each other using them, and I did fine.

 

[ortho060802]

I know that everyone gets so worked up about things being "a waste of time" when you are a first year but later you will realize that anatomy is one of 2 or 3 classes in the first year that are really important to be a successful doctor. You should enjoy your time in anatomy partly for the experience and also for the knowledge. Everyone worries so much about things being high yield. There is a benifit in the process and not just having the high points handed to you. Enjoy your time in gross. In 5, 10 or 50 years I bet it is the class in med school you remember.

 

[SanDiegoSOD]

I know that everyone gets so worked up about things being "a waste of time" when you are a first year but later you will realize that anatomy is one of 2 or 3 classes in the first year that are really important to be a successful doctor. You should enjoy your time in anatomy partly for the experience and also for the knowledge. Everyone worries so much about things being high yield. There is a benifit in the process and not just having the high points handed to you. Enjoy your time in gross. In 5, 10 or 50 years I bet it is the class in med school you remember.

Do you really think thats true for most specialties? The typical line is that learning anatomy in the detail presented in medical school is extremely important for surgeons and radiologists, and not so important for most others. Your thoughts?

 

[Doctor&Geek]

At the faculty town hall today at UAB, one of the surgeons suggested that the loss of anatomic dissection would lead to a decrease in students interested in surgery.

Is there any data to support or disprove this assumption? UCSF I know is a school that is prosection-based anatomy. Did their levels of graduates going into surgery rise or drop? Any input from other institutions?

 

[odrade1]

FANTASTIC IDEA. Student dissection is a waste of time and only exists as a hazing ritual.

I tend to agree. There is also that attractive air of nostalgia & "common bonding experience" as well...

I was expecting prosections when I arrived at med school, and didn't want them; however, when I arrived, our class had cadavers, since they put off the curriculum change by a year. After going through cadaver-based anatomy, I sincerely wish we would have had 30% prosections and 70% radiology. An even better thing to do is to integrate the anatomy into the other stuff you study. I got so bitter over some of the stuff we were made to memorize in anatomy, only to realize later that it had interesting or important clinical features later. BTW, I'm still waiting for the other 80% of the anatomy we were force-fed to be made relevant. Oh well.

About anatomy, I have to say that the new way they are doing it seems SOOOOOO much better to me. I hated scraping fat. I hated digging around blindly while bitter anatomists helped or hindered you to varying degrees. (really there were just two bitter teachers; the rest were good). I thoroughly resent every minute of my incredibly precious time that was stolen from me by the inefficiency of that system. It took me 2 hours to learn 15 minutes worth of relationships in that system. My grades went way up (avg 10 points) when I stopped studying the cadavers and spent my time skipping lab (whenever possible) and reading Netters and Rohens instead. There *are* things you can't learn any other way (the textures of each kind of tissue is one), and there are surprises along the way, like the penis-pumps and the football sized tumors filled with teeth and hair. Also, it honestly *was* a bonding experience for our class. However, med school itself is an intense kind of shared experience that only other physicians (or dentists, if you are coming from a strong dental program, like ours) can really relate to. I'm not sure the bonding of your class will suffer for not having student cadaveric dissections in anatomy.

 

[Critical Mass]

I didn't learn much from dissecting or observing a prosected body. I spent less than 6 hours studying cadavers during the whole semester. It's probably a necessary component of medical school, but I would in no way use this as a plus or a minus in evaluating a school.

<----------UAB reject

 

[OCPreMed]

Yo! I'm heading to UAB in the fall for medical school, and they've announced that anatomy will no longer be dissection based, but instead will be mostly be prosections given by the faculty.

Thoughts from the grizzled vets? Good thing, bad thing, who cares thing?

I didn't read any of the above posts but UCSF and UCLA do the same thing...

 

[JDWflash44]

I didn't read any of the above posts but UCSF and UCLA do the same thing...

CCLCM does the same thing too, but they are unfixed (fresh) bodies

 

[ortho060802]

Do you really think thats true for most specialties? The typical line is that learning anatomy in the detail presented in medical school is extremely important for surgeons and radiologists, and not so important for most others. Your thoughts?

I feel it is true. I am in ortho but if you truely want to be a good medicine physician you need to understand relationships that you learn in anatomy. For example go into GI-you need to understand the anatomy of the digestive system, blood supply (for side effects from cirrhosis), you perform colonoscopies so understanding differences to identify areas of colon and small bowel. there are dozens more examples I could give just on GI ( a medicine sub specialty) Just think of anatomy needed for oncology, Cardiology, Neuro. It really is very important. Everything has its basis in anatomy to have a true understanding of the disease and treatment.

 

[Doctor&Geek]

I feel it is true. I am in ortho but if you truely want to be a good medicine physician you need to understand relationships that you learn in anatomy. For example go into GI-you need to understand the anatomy of the digestive system, blood supply (for side effects from cirrhosis), you perform colonoscopies so understanding differences to identify areas of colon and small bowel. there are dozens more examples I could give just on GI ( a medicine sub specialty) Just think of anatomy needed for oncology, Cardiology, Neuro. It really is very important. Everything has its basis in anatomy to have a true understanding of the disease and treatment.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that anatomy is not important and should be discarded. Only that the method in which is taught is not going to be useful for physicians outside of surgical subspecialties, and arguably even dissection as it is done now isn't going to be very helpful in surgical specialties.

 

[ortho060802]

I don't think anyone is suggesting that anatomy is not important and should be discarded. Only that the method in which is taught is not going to be useful for physicians outside of surgical subspecialties, and arguably even dissection as it is done now isn't going to be very helpful in surgical specialties.

Honestly tell me that taking the time to do the disection and putting in the time to actually make out the relationships for yourself does not leave you with a better understanding of anatomy and in the future better retention.

If learning hands off is so great then Why don't we just give all Interventional Cardiologists a book to read and let them watch a cath and just go to town. It would save all the prescious time everyone has. Surgeons could read a book and see a prosection and perform surgery. There is a proper method to education and just because people think their time is so important they don't want to put time in. I undeerstand there is a lot to learn in 1st year but as I said earlier anatomy is really the foundation for everything else.

 

[Tired Pigeon]

Although in my earlier post I was pretty strongly pro-dissection, I think some of the other posters make really good arguments for using prosected pieces. When I look at my own feelings about it, I think it's more that I found dissection to be really fun (definitely the high point of med school for me so far). I can totally see, though, that it's not really the most efficient use of time. So thanks, everyone, for enabling me to be a little more open-minded on this topic.

 

[psipsina]

Honestly tell me that taking the time to do the disection and putting in the time to actually make out the relationships for yourself does not leave you with a better understanding of anatomy and in the future better retention.

If learning hands off is so great then Why don't we just give all Interventional Cardiologists a book to read and let them watch a cath and just go to town. It would save all the prescious time everyone has. Surgeons could read a book and see a prosection and perform surgery. There is a proper method to education and just because people think their time is so important they don't want to put time in. I undeerstand there is a lot to learn in 1st year but as I said earlier anatomy is really the foundation for everything else.

Are you not allowed to touch the prosections when your studying them in this type of program? I think that being hands on is definitely essential to understanding the 3D relationships, but not necessarily digging thru fat/fascia for endless hours. I remember spending a crazy amount of time digging out every little detail in the neck, but I think if there was a series of prosections and I could poke at it and see the relationships I would learn it as well as I did having tweezed away globlets of fat for countless hours (my guy had a really fat neck). When I had to study already dissected bodies because I had been sick I was able to put my hands in and get ideas of space and move limbs etc, without that it would have been pretty useless I admit.

 

[Doctor Bagel]

I got pretty much nothing out of dissection and hated every minute that I was there. I'd love prosections. One caveat -- I have zero interest in surgery.

 

[pagemmapants]

See, I'm totally the opposite of Dr. Bagel - I had a great time in dissection. TBQH I know it wasn't the most high-yield use of my time and I probably would have scored those last 3-5 points on the exams had I spent each of those 3 hour blocks hugging my Netter's, but a) it was fascinating (especially the hands - I dissected both just for fun) and b) it's something I'll never ever get to do again unless I decide to drop the MD and do anatomy for a living (not likely). Yes, I'm interested in surgery. No, dissection technique mastery does NOT make you any better at surgical procedures. Fixed tissue is a completely different animal from live tissue, for a start.
What it boils down to as a whole is that some people hate it, you don't need to dissect to score well, but if you're the type who's interested in that sort of thing it might very well be the most fun you have in your basic science years.
Hell, I'd almost consider failing first year just so I could do it again.

 

[ortho060802]

Are you not allowed to touch the prosections when your studying them in this type of program? I think that being hands on is definitely essential to understanding the 3D relationships, but not necessarily digging thru fat/fascia for endless hours. I remember spending a crazy amount of time digging out every little detail in the neck, but I think if there was a series of prosections and I could poke at it and see the relationships I would learn it as well as I did having tweezed away globlets of fat for countless hours (my guy had a really fat neck). When I had to study already dissected bodies because I had been sick I was able to put my hands in and get ideas of space and move limbs etc, without that it would have been pretty useless I admit.

From what I understand many programs that use prosections have many bodies to look at because you have to see the various layers (that ofter get destroyed as you go deeper). Because of the is I am unsure if they really let you "root around with a stick" to see everything or every year the course directors would have to prosect many bodies. My school might have the best of both worlds. We have 4 bodies that are prosected by 4th years doing an elective and everyone sees the demonstration of what to do on 45" plasma through out the lab. Then you go to your body and work or up the the prosection to take a closer look.

 

[MedStudentWanna]

Great. Your argument proves jack ****. Spending 6 hours with a prosected body to "do well on a lab practical"?? Anyone can do that, and I'm sure I would have done as well with just 1 hour since I have a great visual memory. However, such learning isn't really long term. What are you in medical school for? To learn about the human body in order to be a good doctor or to binge/purge in order to pass tests? The fact that you did better on the "6 hour crammed prosection" as compared to the thorough dissections does NOT in itself support the superiority of prosection in terms of actual long-term learning; perhaps you didn't do as well in "traditional" anatomy lab sessions because you didn't take enough initiative or weren't active enough in your learning?

Yikes! I'm just a pre-med, but is that what med school does to folks? Dude, she just has a different opinion. No reason to go all exorcist on her.

 

[Critical Mass]

Yikes! I'm just a pre-med, but is that what med school does to folks?

Yes it does oftentimes. I have many a classmate whose personal statement I'd like to read.

Ditto on the comment BTW. psipsina is sweet and deserves to be treated with respect.

 

[psipsina]

Yes it does oftentimes. I have many a classmate whose personal statement I'd like to read.

Ditto on the comment BTW. psipsina is sweet and deserves to be treated with respect.

aawww shucks

 

[CCLCMer]

Are you not allowed to touch the prosections when your studying them in this type of program? I think that being hands on is definitely essential to understanding the 3D relationships, but not necessarily digging thru fat/fascia for endless hours. I remember spending a crazy amount of time digging out every little detail in the neck, but I think if there was a series of prosections and I could poke at it and see the relationships I would learn it as well as I did having tweezed away globlets of fat for countless hours (my guy had a really fat neck). When I had to study already dissected bodies because I had been sick I was able to put my hands in and get ideas of space and move limbs etc, without that it would have been pretty useless I admit.

I don't know about how it works at other schools, but yes, we can touch our cadavers. Actually, the anatomy people are always encouraging us to reach in there and touch them more. I'm like you, I like to touch the cadavers. Some of my classmates don't. If you don't want to touch them, you don't have to.

We usually have four cadavers each week. They've been dissected by a surgery resident, and the residents come to our anatomy labs to explain the prosections to us. Like JDW already said, our cadavers are not embalmed, and we have anatomy lab in a converted operating theater. There are also no lab practicals. So it's a pretty unique anatomy experience. We have anatomy lab two hours each week during first year, and there are also office hours in the afternoons three times per week where we can go look at the cadavers again. One of the anatomy instructors goes over them with us. During second year, we will still have anatomy lab (prosections) once a month, and we also have the option to dissect if we want. Basically, you help the residents prepare the prosections for the first years. There are even a few anatomy prosection sessions during third year, like maybe once per quarter.

I've never done dissections, so I can't compare. But I have to say that I think the way we do anatomy here is really fun. I came to med school expecting to really hate anatomy, but actually it's usually my favorite seminar each week.

 

[Doko]

I totally agree with CCLCMer. Plus, when you start to scrub in on surgeries, do you think everything is going to looked bleached and smell like formalyn when you cut someone open? You can't tell the difference between an artery, vein, and nerve 'cause everything is white.

Prosections are definitely the way to go. I think the anatomy book that you use is key, too. If you have Gray's Anatomy for Students, and Netter's Atlas, you're good to go. Fo shizzle.

 

[Shredder]

Yo! I'm heading to UAB in the fall for medical school, and they've announced that anatomy will no longer be dissection based, but instead will be mostly be prosections given by the faculty.

Thoughts from the grizzled vets? Good thing, bad thing, who cares thing?

Yo, big props to your school, they see the light. Dissection tremendously inefficient and antiquated. Will be obsolete soon enough as ppl struggle to find reasons to justify it in time and money

o yeah I was skipping lab within the first few wks and did fine on tests; use Netters flash cards, I loved them