Do you remember???

[swing]

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For all of you 3rd and 4th years who've now had time on the wards, how much of the detailed stuff from the first 2 years are you able to remember?
Did you have to do a lot of going back and looking things up within a few months of having taken Step 1, or were you pleasantly surprised by how much you retained?
This will, no doubt, vary somewhat from person to person, but I'd be interested in your experiences!
THanks!

 

[DRNickiTay]

Clinicals are different than classroom it is about application. I think for the rest of our lives we will be looking things up. For me I was pimiped a lot over the last ten rotations and somethings I knew from studying and somethings were new for me or I had forgotten. A good attending will continue to ask questions after you get the answer right until you miss something. The whole point of pimping is to expand your knowledge by asking things you need to look up (if done correctly some still think it is fun to embarass a med student). I think if we knew everything we needed for clinicals we could just graduate and forget about rotations. It is so nice to be doing rotations only and hardly anymore classroom. Good luck to you on your upcoming boards!

 

[Anasazi23]

If I had to give you a percentage of TOTAL material I retained for my 3rd/4th year rotation from the classroom, I'd say about 5-10%. Undoubtedly, someone will reply stating that I am inferior to them, because they remember 97.64% of the material they learned in their first two years. The reality is that I have not had the need to draw the chemical structures of the pentose phosphate pathway on any of my rotations, and can't see that need arising any time soon.

I find that I am constantly looking up material both in the hospitals and on my time off -- I think most 3rd/4th years are in the same boat.

As for pimping....I have found it to be the most annoying and generally worst way of teaching/learning I have ever enountered throughout my entire academic career. I'm sure Socrates is turning over in his grave when he hears an attending refer to his pimping as "the Socratic method of teaching." The questions are generally nitpicky, marginally relevant, often opinionated, and of very limited usefulness in terms of long-term retention of important information. I think the reason I get annoyed with pimping is because attendings tend to ask questions that they damn well know you can't answer, and that they have had, in some cases, decades to learn the details of the subject matter on which they are pimping you. Again, people will disagree with me, stating that they have found their pimp sessions to be completely pleasurable and informative. This is to be expected

.......just my .02 cents.

 

[hotbovie]

Gee, I think I remember <5% of the stuff from the first two years. Why? Because most of the trivia is not relevant to the day to day management of patients. Some of the basic stuff is (example is cardiac physiology..but you really only think about that in any great detail when you have a really sick pt in the ICU). Most of the stuff from the first two years is just trivia. How is it relevant to know what chromosome the APC gene is on when you are treating a pt with colon CA? Not at all! (only use is to answer pimping questions). The first two years give you some foundation to help understand the disease processes, but much of it is much more applicable to research than to daily pt care. Also it's taught in a much different context. For example, in pharmacology, you memorize the generic names for all the medications you learn. When you hit the wards, you'll realize that most often people use the trade names.

THe PRACTICAL stuff is NOT taught in the first two years. Just a few of the things I had to learn on the fly in the wards include how to calculate rate for IV fluids, how do you know when to replace electrolytes and how much to give, and how to adjust the doses of antibiotics for renal pts, esp those on dialysis. A lot of the ICU bugs weren't taught in micro.

Having said that, I have found myself having to relearn stuff several times. I'm constantly forgetting and looking stuff up again. There is so much information that you can't keep it all in your readily retrievable memory. And then sometimes I surprise myself be acutally remembering a bit of trivia that is really irrelevant, but came up in pimping. I wonder how my brain cells kept those bits of information instead of something more useful.