LECOM-B prosection

[blondydoc]

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Can anyone tell me what exactly is prosection? I've been reading the interview feedbacks on LECOM-Bradenton and most people are disappointed about the fact that they won't get to do any cutting. I don't see how you can really get the feel for anatomy w/o it.

 

[DragonWell]

Prosection is where the majority of the dissection has been completed, enabling you to focus on identifying structures and seeing their relationships, rather than digging them out of adipose. This is a real advantage time-wise during the anatomy course, since doing anatomy in 10 weeks is slightly insane, and there is no way you could keep up with class and do dissection.

Students absolutely do have the opportunity to dissect here, if you want to. Just make a B in the course and sign up in the spring to do the prosections. We are about to start shortly and since not a lot of people want to spend summer in the lab, I am sure I will have the opportunity to cut as much as I want...

 

[blondydoc]

Thanks, that helps a lot! I guess I got the impression you would not get the chance to cut. I have an interview on 2/20 and I was just trying to get a better idea on how some of the classes work.

 

[GreenShirt]

I just came back from ATSU-Mesa, which also does prosection-only. I know it saves a lot of time, but on the other hand I wonder if you might remember the structures and their relation in the body if you actually have to "dig" them out yourself. Any thoughts on this appreciated.

 

[DragonWell]

Med school, esp anatomy, is different than undergrad in that you must master a fairly vast amount of information in a relatively short amount of time. Hence an expression you will become all too familiar with very soon - "high yield", meaning that you get a lot of learning bang for your time and effort.

Personally, I enjoy dissection and it definitely has it's place, but it is a very low-yield way to learn anatomy. You can spend hours digging out the pudendal nerve to end up with something that closely resembles ground beef, or you could spend the same amount of time learning the entire pelvis and viewing a professional dissection that actually looks like it's "supposed to". Gross Anatomy with dissection was once seen as a right of passage for med students; I think this view is slowly succumbing to the realization that this time is far better invested in learning medicine than poking around in cadavers. Just my $.02.

 

[allendo]

Med school, esp anatomy, is different than undergrad in that you must master a fairly vast amount of information in a relatively short amount of time. Hence an expression you will become all too familiar with very soon - "high yield", meaning that you get a lot of learning bang for your time and effort.

Personally, I enjoy dissection and it definitely has it's place, but it is a very low-yield way to learn anatomy. You can spend hours digging out the pudendal nerve to end up with something that closely resembles ground beef, or you could spend the same amount of time learning the entire pelvis and viewing a professional dissection that actually looks like it's "supposed to". Gross Anatomy with dissection was once seen as a right of passage for med students; I think this view is slowly succumbing to the realization that this time is far better invested in learning medicine than poking around in cadavers. Just my $.02.

By the end of anatomy you will be grateful that the dissection was done for you.

 

[avpatelatc]

I have dissected before when in graduate school, and I must say that dissection is a very important part of learning the anatomy. Particularly, if you see surgery in your future, I believe dissection is imperative. Though the body is preserved, and obviously not fresh, getting the feel of actually running a scalpel through tissue, is not an exercise to perform first on a "live" patient/person. Also, dissection allows you to truly appreciate the proximities and functions of soft/bony tissue, vascular and neural tissue. I agree that it is demanding to dissect and learn with a rigorous schedule, but anatomy is the basis of medical science. Personally, the prosection was a turn off for me at LECOM-B. If you have the opportunity to dissect, I certainly would not pass it up.

My understanding is that for you to dissect at LECOM-B, you also have to apply for that position despite making the grade. Is this correct?

 

[DragonWell]

I have dissected before when in graduate school, and I must say that dissection is a very important part of learning the anatomy. Particularly, if you see surgery in your future, I believe dissection is imperative. Though the body is preserved, and obviously not fresh, getting the feel of actually running a scalpel through tissue, is not an exercise to perform first on a "live" patient/person. Also, dissection allows you to truly appreciate the proximities and functions of soft/bony tissue, vascular and neural tissue. I agree that it is demanding to dissect and learn with a rigorous schedule, but anatomy is the basis of medical science. Personally, the prosection was a turn off for me at LECOM-B. If you have the opportunity to dissect, I certainly would not pass it up.

My understanding is that for you to dissect at LECOM-B, you also have to apply for that position despite making the grade. Is this correct?

No application is necessary. From the actual email sent to our class - Dissection is open to anyone who meets the following criteria :

"-Have a B or higher in Anatomy
-Good academic standing overall
-Be committed – once you sign up you will be expected to put in the hours on a regular basis
-Previous dissection experience preferred but not necessary
-All volunteers will receive a commendation on their file"

 

[Dr.Inviz]

If traditional dissection has worked for several decades, then why would it not work now? Are people dumber nowadays? I'd say not.

 

[DragonWell]

If traditional dissection has worked for several decades, then why would it not work now? Are people dumber nowadays? I'd say not.

Who said anything about people being dumb? I have no idea where that came from. 😕

It is a questions of how best to facilitate student learning. You might ask some med schools, particullary the newer ones to see their histo lab. They will show you a computer screen. If microscopes worked in the past, why use digital images now? Because it's easier, faster, and better. I definitely prefer studying histo on the living room couch as opposed to hauling my butt into the lab to twiddle some dials on a microscope and plow through boxes of slides.

OP, you might check this thread out for some more opinions.

 

[ben_medicine]

I must agree with good old Dr. Inviz. Medical school for years has worked this way. Medical school is not about learning alot in a short period of time (if so the a pa school may be for you). Medical school about mastering basic sciences and the appling that knowlage to medical practice. Recently many medcical school have begun to distance themselves from this. The system based approach currently used is being laughed at (from well respected drs.) b/c it promotes a learn it and forget it mentality. Much of the information is only seen once maybe twice if your lucky.

This probaly stems from the physician shortage idea, the idea that we must pump out drs. as quickly as possible and not worry about the quality b/c some of them are bound to be good.

Going back to the root and foundation of medicine may not be a bad idea.

😳 Sorry if i began to rant, I appoligize for this but i felt that someone needed to say it 😳

 

[scpod]

If traditional dissection has worked for several decades, then why would it not work now? Are people dumber nowadays? I'd say not.

There are a lot of things that used to be done one way that are done another now because times change. Interns used to work 120 hour weeks but they spent the majority of that doing "scut" and not learning a whole lot about medicine simply because that was the way it was always done. There are a lot more efficient ways to do things in many cases. Yes, anatomy is incredibly important, but you aren't going to be an anatomist; you are going to be a doctor. Personally, after 10 weeks of it, I was more than ready to get onto something else. I don't know anyone in my class who feels differently.

 

[DragonWell]

Medical school is not about learning alot in a short period of time (if so the a pa school may be for you).

Wow, that statement is rather shocking I must say. What school do you go to?! And how do I get in?!

 

[ben_medicine]

Medical school is not about learning alot in a short period of time.

It is about mastering alot in a short period of time.

again i'm sorry

 

[scpod]

Medical school is not about learning alot in a short period of time...

That's exzactly what medical school is about. You learn as much as you can, any way that you can.

Medical school about mastering basic sciences and the appling that knowlage to medical practice.

You don't "master" ANY subject in medical school. That's what Masters and PhD degrees are for. They take a narrow topic and "master" it. Physicians take a group of very broad topics and learn as much as they can in the short time span that they have.

 

[Dr.Inviz]

Who said anything about people being dumb? I have no idea where that came from. 😕

It is a questions of how best to facilitate student learning. You might ask some med schools, particullary the newer ones to see their histo lab. They will show you a computer screen. If microscopes worked in the past, why use digital images now? Because it's easier, faster, and better. I definitely prefer studying histo on the living room couch as opposed to hauling my butt into the lab to twiddle some dials on a microscope and plow through boxes of slides.

OP, you might check this thread out for some more opinions.

It was simply an analogy of people from our distant past who had attended medical school using the traditional approaches, and are currently physicians for the past decade (or several decades). I see medical school as an increased trend towards making things "easier" in the name of efficiency. No way am I claiming medical school to be easy, because it is not. However, dissections are an intricate part of anatomy, and I personally don't feel that prosections, models, images on screens will allow for the experience I would attain in anatomy lab when being able to dissect. We already have models and books/pages to look at to quickly grasp the terminology/concept of anatomy. However, dissections allow for a better PERSONAL grasp of what the human organs/parts look like in ACTUALITY and in relative distances/positions from each other as we cut through the different parts and locate organs, muscles, etc. Images in a book or a model don't provide this. Sure, no 2 human will have an exact organ or part appearance, but it is REAL and it what we will have to deal with when being physicians (esp. surgeons), not pages, images, and models. I want to be able to discover the stuff as I cut through the cadavers. If the past produced several great physicians in an "inefficient" system, then don't you think having traditional anatomy will still produce great physicians? We already have video-recorded lectures in most schools, while script-writing services in others, to help students attain proper study material for lecture-based tests. That makes things quite helpful and easier since students don't have to go to lecture and can focus on studying for the entier day and not have to worry about missing alot of material covered in class. And yes, I agree, med school IS about learning and knowing a great amount of material in a short amount of time and applying the knowledge attained for the boards and for when you become a physician; however, IMO, some things should just be left alone.

 

[DragonWell]

I've done cadaver based anatomy 3 times in my education, twice doing traditional dissection and once with prosection. IMO the experiences are not that much different. In traditional dissection, everybody works to uncover the structures of interest, and once that work is done, walks around the lab poking at stuff and actually learning the structures. With prosection, you get to skip step one and go straight to learning and poking around the cadavers. The only difference is most of the grunt work has been done for you.

People that learn kinesthetically (like myself) definitely benefit from being able to touch and feel what they are dealing with, which is why working with a cadaver is so helpful. Both dissection and prosection use real bodies to give students the opportunity to have this interaction, provided they utilize it.

As far as med school needing to stick to the "traditional" curriculum, I think most of the changes are being made in response to the expanding knowledge base of medicine, not to make med students lives easier. Genetics, molecular biology, and pharmacogenomics are going to play huge roles in the medicine we practice over the next 30 years, and the curriculum needs to change to reflect that, not remain static simply because that's the way it was taught decades ago.

 

[FS-Pro]

I wish we would have had prosection. It may seem nice to cugt, and it is, I don't think it's worth the time.

 

[scpod]

I wish we would have had prosection. It may seem nice to cugt, and it is, I don't think it's worth the time.

Prosection is great. It saves so many hours of cutting through fat and fascia so that you can get into "poking at stuff" like Dragonwell said. For most of us, it's more than enough knwledge and experience. Of course, some people who may want to be surgeons will think that it will give them good experience, but I doubt it. Cutting into a cold, wrinkled cadaver just isn't the same as cutting into a fresh, warm human abdomen. Besides, years will have passed from the time you cut into that cadaver until the time you actually cut into a live human. How much are you going to remember? Granted, it can be kind of fun if you enjoy that type of thing, but it's way too time consuming when you have so much other stuff to learn. Surgeons, although they may actually participate in a little cadaver surgery, will have plenty of practice on live subjects during residency, regardless of whether or not they cut up part of one cadaver in medical school. Live patients are still the only way to get the "feel" of things. When they teach you to drive a car, do they get an old broken one from the junkyard and let you sit inside and practice turning the steering wheel-- getting the "feel" of things-- first? No, they put you in the drivers seat and let you take a swing at it. That's the only way to learn it.

 

[anon-y-mouse]

I just came back from ATSU-Mesa, which also does prosection-only. I know it saves a lot of time, but on the other hand I wonder if you might remember the structures and their relation in the body if you actually have to "dig" them out yourself. Any thoughts on this appreciated.

I completely agree with this. I am at an MD school (saw this topic on the "new posts" link, procrastinating), but MD or DO, we both have anatomy with cadavers. Dissecting was extremely helpful for me in terms of understanding fascial planes, interactions between tissues, etc. I will never forget any of the nerves, muscles or ganglia in the orbit, for example, because I dissected it myself and reasoned out what various structures were supposed to be. Studying prosections is akin to studying other dissected cadavers in a traditional system, which is what we obviously have to do before lab practicals, so I suppose any of us "traditional" people have experience with what a prosection would be like. Anyway, I never really got much out of that, although I'm sure some people do. If your goal is to pass the test, I'm sure prosections are for you. If your goal is to see the anatomy unfold and learn it cold, then the best way is to find things yourself. It can be a pain in the ass, and you might be there for quite a long time, but spending that time to clean out a heart, remove the clotted blood, and cleaning up the trabeculae carnae and chordae tendinae is just an ineffable indescribable learning experience...

My professor of anatomy told me about an anatomists' conference he went to recently, where they talked about this issue... the move was, several years ago, to move to prosections, but schools have been moving back away from that and coming full circle to dissections again, and learning has improved (in their eyes). I gained quite a lot out of dissecting.

And... a 10 week course seems quite rushed. I'm not sure what they were thinking there.

 

[scpod]

And... a 10 week course seems quite rushed. I'm not sure what they were thinking there.

Ten weeks seemed rushed to me at first because they took the same material from the twenty-week course (and professors) from USF med school and made it a ten-week anatomy/histology/embryology course. You can't possibly do dissection in that amount of time, so prosection is used. Yet, there IS method to the madness. IMO, the real way to learn anatomy is through repetition, not just taking twice as long to finish the course. The thing you have to remember is that the entire class learns basic sciences-- including anat/histo/embryo-- through PBL. When you finish the ten-week course, you are NOT finished with anatomy. Every time you have a heart section, for instance, in PBL you will also be revisiting the anat/histo/embryo of the heart and middle mediastinum as well as the physiology, pathology, biochem and pharm. I've studied (and been tested on) the development of the heart, for example, three separate times in one year. It's going to happen again next year as well, which means that I will have been tested on heart embryo 4 or 5 times in two years. The first time through you don't retain a lot of information. By the 3rd and 4th times you are putting the little abstract facts into long-term memory. Although the school does pay for the Kaplan course at the end of the second year, you should retain a whole heck of a lot more information this way than if you had learned it for a test 1 1/2 years earlier.

People talk about how great PBL can be for the 3rd and 4th years of clinical, since you already know all the common lab values, what tests to order, treatments for tons of diseases, and have followed over 100 patients from admission to discharge in your cases. Yet, the little understood advantage is that you revisit the most important information over and over again. You won't be tested on kidney physiology or diuretic pharmacology just once. You'll be tested on it several times over the course of two years. That repetition makes it one of the best ways to file information away into long-term memory.

As for anatomy, getting the basics over in ten weeks is good because you can then begin to use your understanding of the whole body in your PBL cases. Plus, you have really only begun to learn anatomy. Sitting for 20 weeks in an anatomy lab, spending 90% of your time watching other people cut is not the way to "learn" it in my book. Anatomy never ends for us. We use it extensively in OPP as well. There is never an OMM lecture that doesn't include a pretty good sized portion of anatomy. You may like to cut and have fun doing it, but in my opinion you are wasting a whole lot of your time-- time thata could be more effectively spent on something else.