Are there schools that don't use cadavers for anatomy?

[deleted29780]

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i am glad my school still uses cadavers. Long live cadavers, long live dissection sessions, long live the smell of formalin, long live anatomy....long live the ancient traditions of our noble profession.

 

[Hayden2102]

"Long live cadavers"... lol

 

[CCLCMer]

def not so. check out the cleveland clinic and minnesota (i think minnesota). anyway, CC relies on prosections and minnesota does a lot of computer based simulations and some prosections i think. but they both def do not use cadavers.

but i also think cadavers are an important part of learning anatomy. It was one of the reasons that I decided not to go the CC. I have a cadaver at the school I go to now and I'm glad I made that decision.

I don't know where you got the idea that we don't use cadavers at CCLCM, especially since you visited and interviewed here and everything. 😕

Just to set the record straight in case anyone is wondering, we most certainly DO use cadavers, and CCLCM students DO dissect if they want to. We actually take anatomy throughout the entire curriculum, not just first year, although most of the sessions are in first and second year. First year, we only use prosections. Second year, the sessions with prosections are required, and there is optional dissection for anyone who wants to do it. Our cadavers are not preserved, and we have surgery residents and fellows who are preparing them for us. The people who do dissection help prepare the prosections for the first years along with surgery residents. It's completely different cutting an unpreserved body versus a typical preserved cadaver like what most med students do. If you want to come as close as you can to having a surgery experience in your preclinical years, I can't think of anything more realistic or closer to surgery on a living person than the dissection option available here.

 

[TexasTriathlete]

Are there any residency training sites where you don't have to work with real patients? You can get blood and poop on you, and that's just gross. I don't really need to work with human patients. I think that a mannequin or a blow-up doll (the one with the circular mouth) would be just fine.

 

[KaraKiz]

My bad! I really thought it was all prosections. I don't know how I misunderstood that, but I def left thinking there was no anatomy lab.

I don't know where you got the idea that we don't use cadavers at CCLCM, especially since you visited and interviewed here and everything. 😕

Just to set the record straight in case anyone is wondering, we most certainly DO use cadavers, and CCLCM students DO dissect if they want to. We actually take anatomy throughout the entire curriculum, not just first year, although most of the sessions are in first and second year. First year, we only use prosections. Second year, the sessions with prosections are required, and there is optional dissection for anyone who wants to do it. Our cadavers are not preserved, and we have surgery residents and fellows who are preparing them for us. The people who do dissection help prepare the prosections for the first years along with surgery residents. It's completely different cutting an unpreserved body versus a typical preserved cadaver like what most med students do. If you want to come as close as you can to having a surgery experience in your preclinical years, I can't think of anything more realistic or closer to surgery on a living person than the dissection option available here.

 

[KaraKiz]

Are there any residency training sites where you don't have to work with real patients? You can get blood and poop on you, and that's just gross. I don't really need to work with human patients. I think that a mannequin or a blow-up doll (the one with the circular mouth) would be just fine.

Radiology. 😀

 

[deleted29780]

"Long live cadavers"... lol

I almost aspirated a foreign body, when i saw this post

 

[FenderHM]

we had a situs inversus in the lab this year! im not a 1st year, but can you imagine if that was your body??? everything's assbackwards! and yes they did use it and yes some lucky kids were assigned to it

 

[Hayden2102]

What a nightmare...

 

[brewmeistervi]

at least right is right, and left is left...

 

[urgentcase]

Death and dying is a huge part of medicine, and anatomy helps desensitize folks to the death and blood and guts heavilly involved in medicine at an early juncture. And anatomy is used extensively by non-surgeons as well as surgeons. And you will be doing several months of surgery in med school whether you like it or not. And at some point you will possibly see an autopsy which will make anatomy cadavers seem quite tame. There are schools that don't use cadavers because access to cadavers is a luxury not all schools have. They use whatever state of the art video and models they can get, but it's probably not the same experience, and you lose out on the bonding with classmates that standing over a dead guy for several months can provide.

yeah and all the arguing and "love" that occurs. I think that cadavers are useless... they should spend more time teaching people pathophys and cut anatomy literally in 1/2, just as those cadavers. Unless you are going into surgery, you will NEVER need anatomy(or at least to the gruesome extent that it is taught)... you keed to know where the heart, liver, spleen...etc lie, but you really don't need to know where corda timpani is or all the vessels that come of the aorta beyond like 4 branches that could be easily learned from a book. I guess there is no harm in like having perhaps 6 sessions of gross anatomy... but there is no point to spending a whole semester on it. It almost seems as if the schools use it as bootcamp to weed out people

 

[smq123]

yeah and all the arguing and "love" that occurs. I think that cadavers are useless... they should spend more time teaching people pathophys and cut anatomy literally in 1/2, just as those cadavers. Unless you are going into surgery, you will NEVER need anatomy(or at least to the gruesome extent that it is taught)... you keed to know where the heart, liver, spleen...etc lie, but you really don't need to know where corda timpani is or all the vessels that come of the aorta beyond like 4 branches that could be easily learned from a book. I guess there is no harm in like having perhaps 6 sessions of gross anatomy... but there is no point to spending a whole semester on it. It almost seems as if the schools use it as bootcamp to weed out people

Neurology (NOT just neurosurg) requires a pretty good knowledge of vasculature and neuroanatomy.

Radiology (obviously) and pathology require a pretty good knowledge of anatomy.

Any procedural subspecialty in internal med will use anatomy. GI and cardiology come to mind.

I think that oncology and, especially, radiation oncology use anatomy a lot.

Some internal med programs require their residents to put central lines in (not everyone shoves things over onto the surgeons). That requires a fairly good knowledge of anatomy.

 

[Electrophile]

Orthopedics and radiology is obviously going to be huge. Gotta know your trochanters from your trochleas from your tubercules! Do you guys in med school get a decent amount of radiology in anatomy class or does that wait for the separate radiology class?

Probably the 3 most disturbing things are the cows and the ponies hanging from meat hooks in the cooler right now for large animal anatomy next semester, the vat with the fresh dog heart and lungs, and watching the lab manager cut the dog's head off with a hand sand and go through the vertebral column with pruning shears as we are now done with the body (except for review after our anatomy test on Monday). Enucleating the rabbit's eye today (for lab animal anatomy) to see a gland behind the eyeball was also pretty high up there. I kind of wish we had smaller anatomy groups though. I'd learn better with just one other person than taking turns.

 

[chaser08]

yeah and all the arguing and "love" that occurs. I think that cadavers are useless... they should spend more time teaching people pathophys and cut anatomy literally in 1/2, just as those cadavers. Unless you are going into surgery, you will NEVER need anatomy(or at least to the gruesome extent that it is taught)... you keed to know where the heart, liver, spleen...etc lie, but you really don't need to know where corda timpani is or all the vessels that come of the aorta beyond like 4 branches that could be easily learned from a book. I guess there is no harm in like having perhaps 6 sessions of gross anatomy... but there is no point to spending a whole semester on it. It almost seems as if the schools use it as bootcamp to weed out people

Medicine is the science of the human body. Why does it seem inappropriate to spend 1 semester learning about the inside of the body you will spend the rest of your life practicing on 😕?

As has been posted, I would say that the majority of medical disciplines require a decent working knowledge of human anatomy. Even as a medical student, how much use are you on rotations if you don't understand? Case in point: I had a patient with a right psoas abscess and we (neurology) were consulted for left-sided weakness. The neurologist was trying to determine how weak his left side was and kept comparing his left and right leg by flexing the patient's legs at the hip and knee and kept telling the patient to relax. We pointed out to the neurologist that he probably couldn't relax because we were aggravating his psoas abscess by flexing his hip. Sure, you could memorize that the psoas causes hip flexion without ever dissecting, but it's not just the psoas but it's relationship to other organs and therefore the possible spread of the infection to other organs that the internist, neurologist, family practitioner, radiologist, and surgeon would need to know.

Gross anatomy wasn't my favorite class, but I never felt that what I was learning was superfluous and I know that on more than one occasion during 3rd and 4th year I've reached back to my times in the anatomy lab to correctly answer pimp questions and likely etiologies for patient symptoms.

I think students who spend the whole first 2 years doing anatomy have a better argument regarding the amount of time spent doing anatomy, but it does not change my belief that learning anatomy through dissection is important for all medical specialties.

 

[VoiceofReason]

When I was in GA there was this huge trashcan-sized container full of submerged severed heads! There had to be a good 20-30 heads. Definitely the most disturbing thing I ever saw. The container was clear so you could see all of these heads floating there and you could just pull them out as needed. Because of the preservative, they were all red-heads.

There were other containers with limbs but that's not nearly the same.

Holy ****. Med school is gonna be rad.