Reading through this thread, I realized I am in the same med school class as the OP. So I'll say a few things here about what the OP wrote.
First, our med school is indeed pretty hard, with a heavy emphasis on research and the basic sciences. We just started a new curriculum over the last few years. The staff is still shuffling the course materials around trying to figure out what combination works best, and sometimes they screw up. But in general they are very receptive to student input. We have 2 deans who are especially accessible to students and anyone with specific concerns can arrange meetings with them and talk.
We just finished a 3-week integrated block on the GI system. The first 2 weeks covered mainly GI physiology and anatomy and was fine. The problem was that the staff decided to throw in some extra material, including head and neck anatomy, during the last week of the block when people are normally trying to review for the test. The staff's rationale was that if we do a little bit of head and neck dissection here and there we wouldn't have to learn all of it at once. We were also not assigned all of head and neck, just the body parts corresponding to cranial nerves V, VII, and a few other parts of the region.
The plan was well-meaning, but the staff also underestimated just how hard head and neck anatomy is and gave us too much information too quickly. To make matters worse, they also told us to start dissecting before giving us a lecture on any of the material. Most of us became confused because, without a prior lecture on the material, we had no idea how to proceed. The chief anatomy faculty had to give a last-minute lecture on head and neck anatomy the day before our GI exam. The lecture was very informative, but it was too little, too late. There was only so much I could cram in a day since I still needed to review the rest of the block.
As for pelvic anatomy, we were given bits and pieces of pelvic anatomy over the past 2 months and only had 1 lab specifically devoted to the topic this block, and that was during week 2. I didn't think the pelvic anatomy we learned this block was overly complicated.
Most of us in the class are pretty irritated at the staff for organizing the material this way. I was pretty frustrated myself. But I'm sure the staff will get plenty of feedback come January and will not repeat the mistake next year.
To the OP, I understand where you frustration is coming from, but much of it is just the nature of medical school. Not only is there a lot of material to learn, but with the constant shuffling of lecturers (at least at our school) it's often hard to separate the big picture from all the seemingly random information we are learning. This problem is especially evident in a block like GI where whole lectures are devoted to learning the names of random enzymes and transporters that seemingly have nothing to do with each other.
Best of luck studying. If I can offer any word of advice I'd say try to figure out what style of learning you are best at, if you haven't done so already, and then try to make use of the resources at your disposal based on your personal style. The lectures might not be the best for your style. Keep in mind that because our school is more research-based, there will be a lot of extra information presented in slides that are more for our own interest and less for the test. I think if you were cut out all the extraneous material in the slides then most of this block (save the head and neck anatomy) really wasn't that bad. And the people at the academic support office can help you simplify the material if you need extra help with that.
