Do ALL medical school students....

Chamahk

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I've been wondering about this for a while. I've tried searching. My questions is:

Despite what path you decide to take or what specialty you choose, do ALL medical school students have to dissect a human body?? :confused::confused::confused:
I could understand surgeons doing so. But what about Physicians??

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Technically, the answer is "no," but everyone does have to take gross anatomy. There are a couple schools that have pushed past the "you're doing this because I had to" attitude and only use cadavers that have been dissected by the professors (prosections). The vast majority of schools still require you to dissect your own cadaver. There will be plenty of hard-charging surgeon wannabes who blast into anatomy thinking it'll be the greatest thing ever, but it soon becomes obvious to everyone that the actual dissection is pretty useless after you've done it a few times. The tissues are all the same, regardless of what part of the body you're cutting, and none of them are anything like cutting a real person, thanks to extensive preservation efforts. In short, the only reason I can see for not universally having prosections is a sense of tradition and preserving a med school rite of passage, but yes, you're probably going to have to do it.
 
As an MD/PhD student, you should know the answer to this question by now!
 
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It shouldn't really be that surprising that all med students, regardless of what they want to specialize in, have to dissect a body. I think it would be kinda lame if you didn't at least look at a prosected cadaver.
 
Even us dental students have to do the dissections for head and neck anatomy. I'm not looking forward to putting that head through the band saw in a few weeks, bah. It's really not as bad as it sounds... once you get over the initial shock of the whole thing and just kinda roll with it.
 
I've been wondering about this for a while. I've tried searching. My questions is:

Despite what path you decide to take or what specialty you choose, do ALL medical school students have to dissect a human body?? :confused::confused::confused:
I could understand surgeons doing so. But what about Physicians??

Also, surgeon = physician.
 
Also, surgeon = physician.

Oh yeah?? I thought a physician was an Internist?? Internal Medicine??? I thought a surgeon was something totally different.

But physicians who sit in a hospital / office and do things like medicals for team sports and working papers, give shots and diagnose diseases. They do not perform surgery. Right??
 
Oh yeah?? I thought a physician was an Internist?? Internal Medicine??? I thought a surgeon was something totally different.

But physicians who sit in a hospital / office and do things like medicals for team sports and working papers, give shots and diagnose diseases. They do not perform surgery. Right??

A physician is a medical doctor. Surgery and internal medicine are just several specialities that a medical doctor can go into. There are many others and all of them are still physicians.

The way it goes is 4 years of med school to get a MD or DO. Followed by residency training which is where you subspecialize into surgery, internal medicine ect.
 
Oh yeah?? I thought a physician was an Internist?? Internal Medicine??? I thought a surgeon was something totally different.

But physicians who sit in a hospital / office and do things like medicals for team sports and working papers, give shots and diagnose diseases. They do not perform surgery. Right??

In the long distant past physicians and surgeons were considered separate professions. Some medical schools and associations have retained that title from then (ex. College of Physicians and Surgeons) though both have come to mean "doctor" now with "physician" being an all-encompassing term for the profession and "surgeon" for those who perform operations.

Whether a physician does surgery is dependent on the specialty.
 
A physician is a medical doctor. Surgery and internal medicine are just several specialities that a medical doctor can go into. There are many others and all of them are still physicians.

The way it goes is 4 years of med school to get a MD or DO. Followed by residency training which is where you subspecialize into surgery, internal medicine ect.

Thanks mate. You've really taught me something :cool:
 
Are you being serious or sarcastic. The smiley seems to indicate the latter.
Looks pretty sincere to me. I also think its a common misconception of surgeons and physicians but they do all go through the same stuff in medical just get matched different
 
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That came off as sarcastic. The 4 exclamation points gave it away. :)
 
Even us dental students have to do the dissections for head and neck anatomy. I'm not looking forward to putting that head through the band saw in a few weeks, bah. It's really not as bad as it sounds... once you get over the initial shock of the whole thing and just kinda roll with it.



lmao i love your pic
 
Serious boss. I had no clue. You've really taught me something :cool:

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You can always do what I did and just not go to anatomy lab. I let all the surgeon wannabe gunners get all the dissection they wanted. I would then walk into the lab on a Friday evening and have all of these nicely-dissected cadavers all to myself to study.
 
I haven't dissected anything but some animals in high school. The smell was atrocious. But I think it's like being an assassin. After you've killed a couple of people, you'll get used to it. Sure, it'll bothered you, but you'll find ways to cope.
 
I toured my college's medical school anatomy lab and they had the dissected cadavers out. It didn't smell as bad as most people in this thread describe. I remember it smelled like raw chicken. The cadavers weren't what I expected though, they were preserved in a way so they were all brownish.
 
Hey, OP, the whole gross anatomy thing is pretty much what med school is all about. I mean you're gonna need to know at least the basics and to see it first hand is just something you'll never forget. It's a right of passage really. Distinguishes you from biologists and chemists that work in labs.

You can always do what I did and just not go to anatomy lab. I let all the surgeon wannabe gunners get all the dissection they wanted. I would then walk into the lab on a Friday evening and have all of these nicely-dissected cadavers all to myself to study.

I wish they didn't make lab mandatory. I actually like working and studying GA from the cadavers but the dissecting portion is pretty frustrating ... especially if you get a fat cadaver whoo. But my school makes you go to lab and takes attendance. They also assign a person every week to be the "group leader" and teach the rest of the table the assigned dissection for that day. Yeah, kinda lame that they make you do that but pays off during the GA practicals.
 
I've been wondering about this for a while. I've tried searching. My questions is:

Despite what path you decide to take or what specialty you choose, do ALL medical school students have to dissect a human body?? :confused::confused::confused:
I could understand surgeons doing so. But what about Physicians??

The point of anatomy lab is three-fold. One, you are there to learn. There is no better way to learn anatomy and the location of structures within the body than to actually see them within a body, dig them out, etc. It is only then that you can appreciate the relationship of structures to each other. You never get this level of appreciation from a book or a video or a computer simulation. Thus having access to cadavers is a HUGE selling point for med schools and those programs without such access have to do a hard sell to try and convince folks that what they have is almost as good as an actual dissection lab.

Second, there is some component of desensitization that occurs in anatomy lab. You start out queasy and scared, but by the end of it, you no longer see the human body the same way. It gets you past a lot of the taboos you will need to put aside when examining or doing procedures on living people down the road. Lets you know you aren't going to faint at the notion of cutting into a body etc.

Third, anatomy lab has historically been a great generator of camaraderie in all med schools. Many longterm friendships arise from the shared experience of working on a dead body with 3 or 4 colleagues.

So the short answer is that most US med schools use cadaver labs. Many also have students attend an autopsy (much "fresher" less prepared body). Some also have procedure labs in later years where you put lines and chest tubes etc into cadavers. And all US med schools are going to have surgery rotations where you are going to be at least tangentially involved in cutting into living bodies. It's a big part of medicine.

Physician is a term today that means doctor, and does include surgeons. You can divide up the medical world into two groups, diagnostician and surgeon. Both are on the same road up until residency. Every med student will have to take anatomy, surgery. And many non-surgeons today do quasi-surgical procedures (eg. cardiologists and interventional radiologists do some of the same things as vascular surgeons, GI doctors and general surgeons both sometimes surgically place feedings tubes and the like). Expect to have bloody gloves in much of medicine. And that's probably a good thing -- this isn't a job where you get paid to sit in a corner and think -- you have to lay hands on the patient.
 
Cadaver lab really isn't that bad. Wait until you get an unshowered elderly woman in cardiac arrest who puked and shat all over herself. Or any of the homeless people who show up in the ED.

I also did a month of forensic pathology. Nothing can prepare you for that experience. I'm still taking SSRIs from it.

As for Law2Doc's post, I think cadaver lab is just one notch above worthless for learning anatomy. The preservation process really distorts everything, and it all looks COMPLETELY different in a living or recently-living human, which is all any of us will ever encounter. Unless, of course, you go back to teach anatomy.

I learned more anatomy in a month of forensic pathology than I did a year of GA. Although I guess that could also be because I never went to lab.
 
Cadaver lab really isn't that bad. Wait until you get an unshowered elderly woman in cardiac arrest who puked and shat all over herself....

Really guys poop and vomit stories:rolleyes:? Stay classy SDN

But mine trumps all:laugh:



Just being a lowly emt I have had the unfortunate experience of this... except worse. I work in a volunteer fire department with about 6-7 other medics and this particular case there were three of us.

A Paramedic and I were in the back after having loaded a 450lb woman (had to call for 4 more firefighters to move her) who fell and had severe pelvic pain as a result so we frickin have to get her mostly naked:uhno::hungover:. (Thank god for that bra:hungover:) and she already smelled horrible.

Now we carry a little jar of Vicks to rub under our noses for times like these yet the stench still cut through.

She was on a couple of meds (no surprise) and one of the side effects was diarrhea. Well in the midst of her pain she basically let loose the foulest smelling Grade A diarrhea you could imagine. She got sick of that smell and then threw up on top of it. Body fluids were now everywhere in the ambulance.

Our ambulance that we were in was the older one, and it didn't have an smell exhaust system like the new ones do.

While I am trying by hardest to keep my stomach down, our driver who had his windows down had to frickin pull over to vomit out the door. The rest of the story is rather uneventful as we deliver the patient. (Some CNA's had to clean her up first:smuggrin:)

I ended up vomiting twice during the clean up of the rig. The ambulance was out of commission for a week while hourly frebreeze, various aerosols, bleaches, and exorcisms took place to the remove the smell.

But now I can go through life having smelt the worst smell there is, with the minor exception of a perforated gangrene rotten bowl. :D
 
Even if you don't want to be a surgeon, there's value to dissecting a cadaver. As MilkmanAl said, surgery on a live person is completely different. When dissecting, it's easier to get a feel for the 3D relationship of body structures. This knowledge helps you understand the reasoning behind parts of the physical exam as well as other tests/procedures. I think it helps a bit with developmental anatomy, too.

I think it serves a psychological purpose, too. It helps students get comfortable being around the human body, become more comfortable with death, and desensitized to some of the "yuck" in medicine.
 
Really guys poop and vomit stories:rolleyes:? Stay classy SDN

But mine trumps all:laugh:



Just being a lowly emt I have had the unfortunate experience of this... except worse. I work in a volunteer fire department with about 6-7 other medics and this particular case there were three of us.

A Paramedic and I were in the back after having loaded a 450lb woman (had to call for 4 more firefighters to move her) who fell and had severe pelvic pain as a result so we frickin have to get her mostly naked:uhno::hungover:. (Thank god for that bra:hungover:) and she already smelled horrible.

Now we carry a little jar of Vicks to rub under our noses for times like these yet the stench still cut through.

She was on a couple of meds (no surprise) and one of the side effects was diarrhea. Well in the midst of her pain she basically let loose the foulest smelling Grade A diarrhea you could imagine. She got sick of that smell and then threw up on top of it. Body fluids were now everywhere in the ambulance.

Our ambulance that we were in was the older one, and it didn't have an smell exhaust system like the new ones do.

While I am trying by hardest to keep my stomach down, our driver who had his windows down had to frickin pull over to vomit out the door. The rest of the story is rather uneventful as we deliver the patient. (Some CNA's had to clean her up first:smuggrin:)

I ended up vomiting twice during the clean up of the rig. The ambulance was out of commission for a week while hourly frebreeze, various aerosols, bleaches, and exorcisms took place to the remove the smell.

But now I can go through life having smelt the worst smell there is, with the minor exception of a perforated gangrene rotten bowl. :D




:barf:ew. another good reason for me to go into pharmacy.
 
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