Discontinue Cadaver Dissection?

[Pterion]

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Hey folks:

My med school is considering elimination of human dissection and moving to a more electronically-based format. They will offer some "prosected specimens" for inspection in the lab, but there will be no hands-on dissection under the new plan. I'm interested to hear what you think, especially those of you who attend schools where this is already the practice.

To be honest, I'm undecided on my position. It's obviously a cost-saving measure, with (as yet) undemonstrated outcome measures. I don't want to fall into the "I did it so you should have to" category, but I think that it was an important experience.

Thoughts?

 

[medic170]

Hey folks:

My med school is considering elimination of human dissection and moving to a more electronically-based format. They will offer some "prosected specimens" for inspection in the lab, but there will be no hands-on dissection under the new plan. I'm interested to hear what you think, especially those of you who attend schools where this is already the practice.

To be honest, I'm undecided on my position. It's obviously a cost-saving measure, with (as yet) undemonstrated outcome measures. I don't want to fall into the "I did it so you should have to" category, but I think that it was an important experience.

Thoughts?

1. What school is this?
2. How does this save costs significantly? Bodies are donated.
3. I think it will detract from your medical education enormously if you do not have a cadaver to study! How will you do practical exams? How can you learn the human body without studying one? I don't see how any med school could keep its accredidation if they teach gross anatomy without cadavers to study.

 

[dr. deez]

🙁 gross anatomy is a really good way to understand the form and function of the human body. imo some things can't just be learned by computer immages 🙁 what does your class say?

 

[2112_rush]

Hell no! What are they thinking? I agree with above posters that anatomy is one of those things you have to see and touch yourself to really understand. Even with prosected specimens, I feel that something important is lost. I mean, who doesn't cherish those memories of picking through fat and fascia?

Hey folks:

My med school is considering elimination of human dissection and moving to a more electronically-based format. They will offer some "prosected specimens" for inspection in the lab, but there will be no hands-on dissection under the new plan. I'm interested to hear what you think, especially those of you who attend schools where this is already the practice.

To be honest, I'm undecided on my position. It's obviously a cost-saving measure, with (as yet) undemonstrated outcome measures. I don't want to fall into the "I did it so you should have to" category, but I think that it was an important experience.

Thoughts?

 

[Tiki]

I disagree with all of you. My time spent at the prosected cadaver was one hundred times more helpful then anytime I spent dissecting my cadaver. Dissection was fun the first couple of weeks of med school, but it wears off pretty quickly. I don't have enough time in the day to spend an hour looking for the stupid chorda tympani, or picking fat pockets out of the orbit. Give me a prosected body any day.

 

[beanbean]

1. What school is this?
2. How does this save costs significantly? Bodies are donated.

The bodies may be donated, but the embalming process, storage system, staff to maintain the cadavers and lab, and the lab facilities are not.

3. I think it will detract from your medical education enormously if you do not have a cadaver to study! How will you do practical exams? How can you learn the human body without studying one? I don't see how any med school could keep its accredidation if they teach gross anatomy without cadavers to study.

There are schools that currently use prosections and computer simulation to teach anatomy. Do a search on SDN to find a list of schools; there was a thread about it last year I think.

There are many different opinions on the teaching of anatomy and what method is best. Some students feel they gain nothing from digging through fascia and fat looking for structures and others find the experience invaluable. For me anatomy was taught over the year as part of an organ-based curriculum. We had groups of four students per cadaver. A prosected cadaver was also provided during head and neck which was very helpful. I can't imagine not having the dissection experience. It has been integral to my understanding of anatomy.

 

[DrWuStar]

i think the cadaver is really important. i learn a lot of anatomy from the atlases, but you have to be able to get in there and touch stuff for a sense of depth and wieght, etc. i'm sure a computer program could teach you a lot, but it's still 2-D. you can't touch the organs and stick your hand between them and so forth. that has been an important part of the experience for me. sure, digging through all that fat is tedious, but that's what bodies are made of, and it's important to learn. i think a program based on the study of prosected cadavers could be almost as good, but i say no way to a computer based program. not the same thing.

 

[DoctorWannaBe]

I thought dissection was a waste of time. A lot of times, we didn't know what we were looking for, and our cadaver had had cancer and radiation so we were missing much of the perineum structures. I would have much preferred to study on a prosected cadaver since it would have saved the hundreds of hours in lab digging through fat and fascia trying to find the structures. Also, by the end of the semester most cadavers in my class were so dried out and messed up that it made it hard to learn from them. This didn't make studying any easier. I don't think electronic anatomy is the answer, and I still think it was valuable to see the structures on a real body.

 

[medic170]

I disagree with all of you. My time spent at the prosected cadaver was one hundred times more helpful then anytime I spent dissecting my cadaver. Dissection was fun the first couple of weeks of med school, but it wears off pretty quickly. I don't have enough time in the day to spend an hour looking for the stupid chorda tympani, or picking fat pockets out of the orbit. Give me a prosected body any day.

There are schools that currently use prosections and computer simulation to teach anatomy. Do a search on SDN to find a list of schools; there was a thread about it last year I think..

I do not disagree that using a prosected cadaver is fine. In fact, that is what I am going to be using at my school. The issue was that the OP said they were not going to use cadavers at all, and I think that would be a huge mistake. I never said prosected cadavers were not good, they better be or I am in trouble 😉 but don't you think that having a cadaver is important?

 

[Pterion]

In response to medic170, this is the University of Louisville. Yeah, I know. It's not Hopkins. But, this is the place where Abiocor does its articificial heart research and the first (US) hand transplant was done. So gross anatomy is a bit of sticky issue here.

I agree about the frustration following hours of picking through endless swirls of fat only to have the gunners take credit for finding the delicate cutaneous branch of the nerve that the octagenarian lab assistant will yank out "accidentally". On the other hand, fat is a reality - and I would suspect today's surgeons have plenty of it to deal with in the OR. Any upperclassmen have thoughts on this?

Another facet: what about the psychological hurdle of getting over the thought of a human "specimen"? Do you think a prosected specimen gives the full monty?

 

[Rogue_Leader]

I can see eliminating individual disections. I remember studying for the back and limbs practical. After 3 hours alone in the lab, asking "what the hell is this" about a billion times, I gave up, bought a copy of Rohen's and just studied from that, and it worked great. I was able to look at the different dissections and attempt to identify the structures and then check the lines to see if I got it right, rather than staring at an artery for 20 minutes in lab wondering if it's the right gastric artery or the posterior superior pancreaticoduadoneal artery. Also, Rohen kinda gives you the limits of what kind of stuff you'd have to be responsible to find on a practical exam. Because if there's a structure that a team of experienced anatomists can't find to put in their book, then odds are that structure isn't going to be on your practical either. After I got that book, I stopped going into lab outside of regular dissection because I wasn't getting much out of it. Had dissections been phased out, I doubt I would have really missed it.

 

[dancinjenn]

I highly doubt that I would understand the relationships with just using prosections or a computer-based system. I loved anatomy lab, I dissected every day I was down there. I liked being able to correlate the 2-d pics and lecture into the various layers of the body and I cut down thru them. Of course I am a very visual 3-d hands-on person. I only used the prosections we had when we weren't required to do those dissection on our own cadavers because we would lose too much work. I personally think that knowing what it looks like in actuality is much better than studying a Netter.

 

[phoenixsupra]

I highly doubt that I would understand the relationships with just using prosections or a computer-based system. I loved anatomy lab, I dissected every day I was down there. I liked being able to correlate the 2-d pics and lecture into the various layers of the body and I cut down thru them. Of course I am a very visual 3-d hands-on person. I only used the prosections we had when we weren't required to do those dissection on our own cadavers because we would lose too much work. I personally think that knowing what it looks like in actuality is much better than studying a Netter.

Word 🙁

 

[owen_osh]

My best friend's dad went to U of L years ago, and he told me they only had prosections back then.

Personally, I think a lot of the anatomy is overkill and there's a lot of wasted time in the lab. I don't see how moving to prosections and computer based education would really hurt. (I think a lot of people in my class basically learned from computer progams even though we did the actual dissection too.)

But, I think the school should keep a fourth year elective in anatomy for students who really need good anatomy knowledge. I think this would be a good compromise, although I don't know if it would bring much in the way of reduced costs.

Why is U of L being so cheap?

 

[souljah1]

We used prosections only here at UCSF when I was a first year and I think it was just fine. Having just completed surgery, as well as having finished neurology and orthopedics - I think I can safely say that studying anatomy from prosections that have been prepared by people who are experts at dissecting was absolutely fine in preparing me to succeed on the wards and in the OR.

I don't know about having no experiences with cadavers though....That seems a little disconnected to me, but you never know.

 

[Hoya11]

I think the issue here is, is this an interesting and useful tool, or is it an annoying and gross right of passage? I think it can be both..

I think it is necessary to dissect at least a few times to get past the whole shock factor, familiarize yourself with the human body, see what it REALLY looks like.

On the other hand, I was in lab WAAY too often and they were mandatory, and most times what we were doing was just purposely disgusting.. like skinning very finely to "appreciate cutaneous nerves" that would often be just clumps of fat we called nerves. And why is it so often and so long? A month of it 3X a week would be WAY more than enough, not a whole semester or sometimes a year of it. Who cares on month 3? its just disgusting at that point.

 

[beanbean]

I do not disagree that using a prosected cadaver is fine. In fact, that is what I am going to be using at my school. The issue was that the OP said they were not going to use cadavers at all, and I think that would be a huge mistake. I never said prosected cadavers were not good, they better be or I am in trouble 😉 but don't you think that having a cadaver is important?

The OP indicated that his/her school would be offering prosected specimens. I don't know if there are any schools running anatomy courses just with computer simulation.

I feel I had the best of both worlds - our own cadaver and a prosection for reference.

 

[velo]

I disagree with all of you. My time spent at the prosected cadaver was one hundred times more helpful then anytime I spent dissecting my cadaver. Dissection was fun the first couple of weeks of med school, but it wears off pretty quickly. I don't have enough time in the day to spend an hour looking for the stupid chorda tympani, or picking fat pockets out of the orbit. Give me a prosected body any day.

yeah but you only appreciated the prosected body after you did the dissection yourself. You gain the real understanding of the 3d anatomy, relationships, and just how everything fits together by doing the dissection yourself. As for finding small difficult structures? yeah try digging around for it, but if you can't find it look at the prosected body/atlases/etc. Bottomline to the OP: there is no substitute for the three dimensional understanding that real cadaver dissection gives you.


There is also something to be said about cadaver dissection being part of the "hidden curriculum" of med school. Separating the body from the self, making your first purposeful incision, desensitizing yourself to the idea that we're all bags of meat. I don't know about you guys, but I'm much more comfortable around patients thanks to the perspective that cadaver dissection gives you. I think its invaluable, completely against scrapping cadaver dissection

 

[LaurieB]

I just finished anatomy, and I have to say that I learned almost all of my anatomy in the lab by dissecting and getting to know my cadaver's structures really well. I would have had a really hard time conceptualizing the the 3D structures on a computer, and I think I wouldn't have become so familiar with a prosected cadaver. For me, dissecting was a way to discover relationships between structures and to gain an apprecation for the layering of the human body (including fat, fascia, and connective tissue). If I had only seen prosections I think that those dimensions would have been lost on me.

That all said, there were other students in my class who could have learned the entire body from Rohen, Netter's, and Chung. I think it is really a matter of learning style. Perhaps for a good portion of the class an online/prosection curriculum is totally adaquate; I just worry for those who really need the experience of dissection. I never thought I'd feel so strongly in favor of dissection until I saw how much I relied on it.

My 2!

 

[NDESTRUKT]

I liked the cadaver experience. It was something that only medical students have the priveledge of going through (in school that is). It almost seems like a rite of passage, I mean I read Rohen and Netter and learned a lot from those atlases but the dissection itself gave me more of an experience.

Maybe it's a high price to pay for just an experience, but I feel that I did learn things. I mean, optometrists, pharmacists, and NP's take anatomy even - but how many of them can understand how thick the fascia sometimes is, how annoying all that fat can be, what the fat really feels like, and how sometimes you aren't sure if it's an artery or vein or nerve? How many of those people understand the frustration of finding the small muscles (like the innermost vs the internal intercostals) and appreciate it?

I doubt many of them can.

 

[WRXwing]

Eh, I'm not sure it really matters all that much. It's definitely a detriment to those who are hands-on learners. They're the ones who best understand by, as someone said, going through the body layer-by-layer to understand it.

But there are others that don't need that to understand the interconnectivity of parts of the body, and for these people, anatomy lab is really a large amount of wasted time in relation to actual gained knowledge. I actively dissected for a few weeks, then I quit and just walked around to other cadavers. If someone had a particularly well-dissected hand, for example, I'd just go look at that body and learn it. A prosected body has particularly well-dissected everything, hopefully.

The argument could be made that one learns "better" by doing it themselves, or that future surgeons need this experience. I'm not so sure about that. Now, in my fourth year, if I look at classmates who were all about the dissection, and I look at classmates who learned from others' work, there's not a lot of difference. We all have no recollection of lab. 🙂

As for a computer simulation. Well... it's never going to be as good as the real thing, but they do some amazing things with graphical modeling these days. I imagine there will be some really slick programs in the future.

 

[azzarah]

I think learning from prosections will be just fine. 🙂 I did some surgery research this summer and learned more anatomy in 8 wks than I did during the entire anatomy course. Personally, I thought dissecting cadavers was sorta depressing and a big waste of resources.

 

[Harrie]

2. How does this save costs significantly? Bodies are donated.

Bodies cost the schools about $20,000 each.
Still, I think that the cost is worth it.

 

[ButlerPharm.D.]

Bodies are donated at the time of death to an agency. All medical schools have to purchase their cadavers. Cadavers run about $50 each.

1. What school is this?
2. How does this save costs significantly? Bodies are donated.
3. I think it will detract from your medical education enormously if you do not have a cadaver to study! How will you do practical exams? How can you learn the human body without studying one? I don't see how any med school could keep its accredidation if they teach gross anatomy without cadavers to study.

 

[ButlerPharm.D.]

I think you're a little off on that figure. CCOM pays $50 a cadaver.

 

[medic170]

Bodies are donated at the time of death to an agency. All medical schools have to purchase their cadavers. Cadavers run about $50 each.

That is not always tue. As a paramedic, I have delivered bodies directly to MSU for donation from the funeral homes.

Even at $50, that does not significantly save cost to a school to discontinue using cadavers.

 

[WatchingWaiting]

That is not always tue. As a paramedic, I have delivered bodies directly to MSU for donation from the funeral homes.

Even at $50, that does not significantly save cost to a school to discontinue using cadavers.

As has been mentioned, the big expense is the faculty overhead for dissection-based anatomy. I'm sure it varies from school to school, but having a 10/1 or so student to faculty ratio for three or four hours a day of dissection three or four days a week for a whole quarter really does add up, especially relative to most classes which just have to pay for one lecturer three or four hours a week plus a couple of TAs.

 

[10minutes]

It really depends on person. I would definitely prefer looking at prosected body than bumping heads with each other trying to look at things. My group was consisted of 5 people and 3 of them were very active (or must-see type). It was so funny watching them bumping heads and pushing each other. On the other hand, I and the other girl often ended up coming back later to see the structures we could not see during the lab. Not to mention that a few of the structures we thought identified right were actually something else. Med students are already busy enough. We had to spend too much time in the lab.

 

[TigerPath05]

I don't think it matters what kind of learner you are hands on or hands off...to be in medical school and essentially become a physician without having the fundamental first hand experience of seeing the human body at its worst and best is depriving a future doctor of what medicine is about. I definitely agree computer programs and atlases help tremendously, but if you don't have the cadaver you don't get the experience!

 

[Taurus]

There should be two tracks: one for those who want to learn from computers and prosections and another one for those who want to get their hands dirty. Not everyone wants to go into surgery.

 

[Gut Shot]

My institution uses standard dissection for most of the anatomy course, and prosections (done by a beloved, now-retired anatomy professor) for head and neck. Having 100+ "head pies" and assorted other stations to review was, for me, far superior to the tedium of dissection. The results showed on my practical grade. I'm not certain why anyone would feel the need to pick through enless layers of fascia in order to understand the requisite spatial relationships.

Besides, in a year you will have forgotten 95% of it, anyways.

 

[Elysium]

In my opinion, dissecting is the biggest waste of time on the planet. We have 6 people in our group and there are 3 guys that are really into it and the rest of just kind of sit around and watch. I hate the smell, the temperature, the inhumanity of it. It's depressing to see over-eager surgeon wannabe first years hacking through someone's camper's fascia. It's a literal horror to skin your cadaver (which I did for 45 minutes one fine day 2 weeks ago). I wish like hell that we had prosected cadavers, but our slidshod anatomy department would never invest the time or energy in such a thing. So, 6 more months of walking around that hell hole every Tuesday and Thursday.

I say use the computer programs and have 1 or 2 prosected bodies.

 

[DriNDT]

After four and a half months of anatomy dissection, I have concluded that prosected cadavers could be particularly useful. We have 6 students per donor body, but only 3 students perform a dissection at one time. That means that half of the anatomy we learn is not dissected first-hand, but is taught to us by our peers. I have to say that "teaching" a lab to your classmates is the BEST way to learn anatomy... it guarantees that you really know it. I don't feel as though the process of physically dissecting is any more useful than reviewing the already dissected body on my own time in preparation for presenting it to my group members. Dissection videos and 3-D resources are excellent supplemental aids, but in no way compare with seeing the anatomy in person. Dr. Netter was good, but sometimes things don't quite resemble the picture in the atlas. I could really do without the time spent investigating fat and fascia, however, and searching for elusive cutaneous nerve branches 😉

 

[Baditude]

We had 10 people per cadaver and only 2 did the majority of the dissection. I wasted a huge portion of my days sitting and "watching" those 2 dissect. Even after a good dissection by a 1st year it is heard to identify the structures because the dissections are not that great and structures are cut. The time I spent in the lab watching I could have learned a lot more with prosections and computer simulations.

 

[2112_rush]

We have 4 people per cadaver at my school. This arrangement really lets each person dissect if they want to, instead of always watching. Alot of the time all 4 of us would be dissecting at once. With 10 people at one cadaver I can see how that would be a waste of time.

 

[emily69]

It's been eons since I've been on SDN and eons since I've had time for anything. But anyway back to the point. Personally, gross anatomy is my favorite subject because I can see, touch, feel, cut, etc. and really involve all my senses in learning. For me, half the fun is "looking for" that nerve (whatever nerve) or the blood vessel "that's supposed to be here but isn't". I agree it can be disgusting (the smell, the lobs of extraperitoneal fat) but the actual process of dissection helps me lock the information into my mind.

I think I got really lucky because our school has an awesome anatomy program and the professors are amazing. However, I could see how anatomy could be pure hell if it were taught badly.

We have some prosections for those of us who learn better that way and also in case "that nerve" is never found or was sliced up unwittingly by an overzealous lab partner. 🙂

 

[supercut]

You cannot learn anatomy as well from pictures as you can from hands on experience with a cadaver. Understanding anatomy is important for most fields of medicine. You want a radiologist who doesn't have a grasp of 3d anatomY? How 'bout you medicine types...you need to understand anatomy too..maybe not in the detail that surgeons do, but how do you expect to be able to put in lines when you are a resident when you don't have a good picture in your head where the vessels are?

I think doing away with dissection would be a shame. I realize that not everyone enjoyes the expeirence, but it's important. LIke another poster said, one thing that separates MD from PA/NP training is the degree of anatomy learned.

I could not heve learned anatomy as well as I did without the dissection expeirnece. Many other people in my class found the lab time valuable as well, and not just the future surgeons.

 

[thewebthsp]

Well also understand you will retain only about 5% of your anatomy course knowledge. I think anatomy is for making the body _familiar_ at first. You will continue to study anatomy the rest of your life. The dissection experience was not my forte, but it was helpful, and I agree, almost a "rite of passage" into medical school. I don't regret it (even though I did go 2 hours late a few times!! 🙂

You cannot learn anatomy as well from pictures as you can from hands on experience with a cadaver. Understanding anatomy is important for most fields of medicine. You want a radiologist who doesn't have a grasp of 3d anatomY? How 'bout you medicine types...you need to understand anatomy too..maybe not in the detail that surgeons do, but how do you expect to be able to put in lines when you are a resident when you don't have a good picture in your head where the vessels are?

I think doing away with dissection would be a shame. I realize that not everyone enjoyes the expeirence, but it's important. LIke another poster said, one thing that separates MD from PA/NP training is the degree of anatomy learned.

I could not heve learned anatomy as well as I did without the dissection expeirnece. Many other people in my class found the lab time valuable as well, and not just the future surgeons.

 

[4 Ever]

scenario:

Student 1 reads netters and then goes to lab to dissect the body and then comes back before the practical to review the structures

Student 2 reads netters and watches the dissections online

I guarantee that student 1 will have an easier time identifying structures on a body than student 2. I know of someone who actually did this for her studying purposes and it didn't lead to good grades in lab. Plus, being able to tell the difference between a nerve and fascia is very important - u don't want to have to figure out the difference during surgical rotations on a patient.

Also, there are a lot of variations in people and the books will only show you the ideal stuff - most online places might show this as well. Only after looking at numerous bodies did i appreciate how diverse the vessels are in the body. i.e. the IMV does NOT always join the Splenic vein

 

[Arsenic]

Anatomy is going to be a bitch no matter what, the cutting makes it more fun even though a lot of it is a waste of time. Sticking your hand into the chest and digging out the ligamentum arteriosum.... or finding the nutcracker in the abdomen! Where else could we do this stuff and not get thrown in jail?

 

[erin682]

I have to say that I'm one of those who hated anatomy. Not so much the subject but the lab. I was constantly sick from the smell and disturbed by what we were doing to people. For me lab was a horrible learning environment and I gained virtually nothing from disection. I am so incredibly grateful not to be in that class any longer.

That said I think that removing cadavers from med school would be a huge mistake. I would have been all for prosected cadavers because disection was worthless for me but removing it entirely would be useless for practicing medicine later on. I learned most of my material from netter's and didactic information but I didn't really know it until I'd spent at least a few hours in the lab.

 

[JohnHolmes]

Hey folks:

My med school is considering elimination of human dissection and moving to a more electronically-based format.

Thoughts?

It sounds like your med school has no interest in producing surgeons.

But seriously, I think UCSF got rid of lab and is mostly or wholly the electronic format you describe, word is their students are suffering in yet unknown ways. I don't like this idea. One of the debates where I go to school was whether there should be prosected cadavers or not, since we have a hard time finding some obscure nerves, etc in lab. The argument against it is, that people would come, look at it, learn, then leave without doing the lab, so when the practical comes around, they still ace it without having done the work.

If anything, I don't think ENOUGH time is allocated to anatomy. Columbia has the right idea with its super intensive approach. Maybe that is why they match into ortho and neurosurgery so well ....

JH

 

[JohnHolmes]

I disagree with all of you. My time spent at the prosected cadaver was one hundred times more helpful then anytime I spent dissecting my cadaver. Dissection was fun the first couple of weeks of med school, but it wears off pretty quickly. I don't have enough time in the day to spend an hour looking for the stupid chorda tympani, or picking fat pockets out of the orbit. Give me a prosected body any day.

I understand your point, but not everything in the medical school curriculum is there solely to bring rapture to students day in and day out.

 

[yaah]

There are two reasons for learning anatomy.

1) Learning structures, names, and relationships so that you can do well on the test.

2) Learning about the human body, its complexity, and the marvel that it is.

For #1, the cadaver dissection isn't that helpful. I think many who criticize it or don't spend lots of time with it frankly see anatomy as #1. Does learning about the chorda tympani or the pterygopalatine fossa help you in most branches of medicine? Probably not.

Prosections and atlases are nice - they help you see the relationships better and demonstrate things well. But it's hard to appreciate it unless you find it yourself. To be sure, anatomy cadavers are not completely real life - preserved, things stuck together, colors are all gray. But it is a real human body, and the structures are there. It can give you an appreciation for things - finding the gastric artery, for example, can be a difficult task - yet if a surgeon nicks it the patient may die.

As someone currently in pathology residency, doing autopsies is the best way to learn anatomy, but this clearly isn't practical for 1st year students. Do I learn from a book? Sure. But until you actually do things and see things for yourself, it isn't going to be something that is important to you and memorable.

IMHO, this goes along with many med schools eliminating microscopy time in favor of projections, computer images, etc. It is the "dumbing down" of medical education, so that you learn what you are told and the responsibility is on you to memorize lists, not to discover for yourself and make your own connections. Sure, you can learn things well enough to do well on the board exams by never leaving the library, but does that help your future patients? Perhaps one may argue that anatomy lab doesn't help future patients either, and it probably doesn't if you approach it with a certain attitude. It is a great privilege to be able to learn from an actual human body.

Is there anything I learned in anatomy lab that I couldn't have learned by just using computers and books? Well, in terms of structure and relationship, probably not. But it is a memorable portion of my medical education. Taught me to appreciate the wonder of the human body, to realize the incredible variation that goes on, the degrees of normal and abnormal, how disease can impact function, and just how tightly controlled everything is.

I shudder to think of a generation of future doctors trained without microscopy and gross anatomy. Perhaps I overestimate the impact, but I think well-trained and well-rounded people, trained to think and discover, make the best physicians.

 

[gary5]

I agree that dissecting is a rite of passage. I also agree that it is a huge waste of time. I'd rather have prosections. I learn very little while we're cutting things up.

 

[SJBX]

Just curious, but what is the "super intensive approach" of Columbia?

If anything, I don't think ENOUGH time is allocated to anatomy. Columbia has the right idea with its super intensive approach. Maybe that is why they match into ortho and neurosurgery so well ....

JH

 

[sundevil23]

I agree with the posters that stated that the dissection was a waste of time. At my school we take anatomy for 10 weeks so we are already rushed, but dissection days were the worst, we always felt behind on the days we dissected. Many times we would find structures clean them but not learn their identity to the end of the dissection. I would spend most of my time with Rohen, the prosections, and internet sites with mock practicals. Our dissections were rarely good enough to study ( ie not cleaned enough, nerves cut, not sprayed down so dry, etc). I would have been thrilled not to have had to dissect and I feel I could have learned as much anatomy.

 

[thewebthsp]

Columbia has a year of anatomy, and they do it the old fasioned way.

Good memories of that place :-D

I agree with the posters that stated that the dissection was a waste of time. At my school we take anatomy for 10 weeks so we are already rushed, but dissection days were the worst, we always felt behind on the days we dissected. Many times we would find structures clean them but not learn their identity to the end of the dissection. I would spend most of my time with Rohen, the prosections, and internet sites with mock practicals. Our dissections were rarely good enough to study ( ie not cleaned enough, nerves cut, not sprayed down so dry, etc). I would have been thrilled not to have had to dissect and I feel I could have learned as much anatomy.