Take cadaver prosection class or not?

[Wabi-sabi]

I’ve been admitted to a med school for next year and am currently scheduling classes for the spring semester of my undergrad. My school offers a cadaver prosection class where I would would help to dissect human cadavers for A&P classes and am wodering if you guys that have taken anatomy in med school think it would be helpful or not? Any advice is much appreciated!

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[DrStephenStrange]

I’ve been admitted to a med school for next year and am currently scheduling classes for the spring semester of my undergrad. My school offers a cadaver prosection class where I would would help to dissect human cadavers for A&P classes and I am wondering if you guys that have taken anatomy in med school think it would be helpful or not? Any advice is much appreciated!

Sounds like some useless class they invented to make extra money on naive students.
Will it help you for like the first few weeks of anatomy lab? Maybe
Is it necessary? Absolutely not.
Anatomy is the tiniest subject tested on boards. This is not gonna do anything for you. Enjoy your time off instead. That's way more beneficial.

 

[Deecee2DO]

Sounds like some useless class they invented to make extra money on naive students.
Will it help you for like the first few weeks of anatomy lab? Maybe
Is it necessary? Absolutely not.
Anatomy is the tiniest subject tested on boards. This is not gonna do anything for you. Enjoy your time off instead. That's way more beneficial.

Def agree with this. Anatomy is exceedingly low yield on boards OP. Make the spring semester as chill as possible just dont fail anything lol

 

[Osteosaur]

nope. you learn the important stuff for anatomy after all the cadavers are dissected and you go around looking at different bodies, not during dissection.

unless you're gunning to become an anatomy TA and get real popular with M1s who have to dissect their own cadavers (which is really just busy work. You learn nothing dissecting) there is no reason to become a master dissector

 

[Sleepingdoc]

Go enjoy your life... Go to a remote island where you do not get any internet or any media so you can freshen your mind and spirit. Stop spending money on useless classes you will never use... you will need that money for the after exam bar use.

 

[Laradd]

Totally useless. Will not help you with anything and just waste your time.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Agree with everyone else. Honestly at least for MSK, the dissections were so detailed and time consuming that I didn’t learn very much. I learned everything for the anatomy practical from a cadaver anki deck my school provides.

 

[JoaoMoutinho]

I agree with everyone else to a point. Don't take the class if you think it will give you an edge in med school, because it probably won't. Most of your anatomy learning will come when you aren't actually dissecting but when you take time afterward to go back in the lab and study the cadavers.

However, if you are genuinely interested in the class, then I don't see any reason why you shouldn't take it. It could prove slightly beneficial (but by no means necessary) for two reasons:

1) a little bit stronger baseline anatomy knowledge, though many people (myself included) get to med school without knowing any anatomy and do just as well or even better than everyone else

2) you may be able to save yourself a couple minutes on your dissections in med school, which gives you a little more time to study. Additionally, it could make studying easier because you may be less likely to accidentally cut or ruin more sensitive structures in the body.

If you think the class would be fun, and if you are genuinely interested in it, and it doesn't cost anything extra (I'm including time and stress in the costs here!!), then go ahead and take it. If you want to take it because you think it will give you a leg up in medical school, then it's probably not worth your time.

 

[Wabi-sabi]

Thanks for the advice everyone! I really appreciate it!

 

[NickNaylor]

I doubt it would be helpful to you from an academic perspective (remember that even if it's helpful for anatomy, anatomy is only one course and arguably a not-that-useful-one over the long-term), but it might be a good experience if you enjoy teaching.

 

[kraskadva]

Counter point - anatomy is fundamental to medicine and most people who don't enjoy anatomy/say they didn't learn anything from dissections are typically *really bad* at dissecting. Speaking as someone who TA'd med school anatomy, the ones who complained the most typically had the most hacked up cadavers, or wasted all their time picking at fat because they didn't understand tissue planes, so *of course* they didn't learn any thing in lab.

Having a course like this before med school can help ease you into med school anatomy, and speed up your learning by getting you familiar with the terms and skills of anatomy lab. However I do agree with others that it's not going to be high yield for boards (though I don't think this should be your concern yet) and that it's not going to magically make you a MS1 rock star or mean you won't have to study anatomy once you get there.

So, *if* you think you would enjoy it, and it's not going to add much to your debt/stress load, then go for it. However, if it's going to be a big drain, then the benefit you might get is not worth being more stressed now.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Counter point - anatomy is fundamental to medicine and most people who don't enjoy anatomy/say they didn't learn anything from dissections are typically *really bad* at dissecting. Speaking as someone who TA'd med school anatomy, the ones who complained the most typically had the most hacked up cadavers, or wasted all their time picking at fat because they didn't understand tissue planes, so *of course* they didn't learn any thing in lab.

Having a course like this before med school can help ease you into med school anatomy, and speed up your learning by getting you familiar with the terms and skills of anatomy lab. However I do agree with others that it's not going to be high yield for boards (though I don't think this should be your concern yet) and that it's not going to magically make you a MS1 rock star or mean you won't have to study anatomy once you get there.

So, *if* you think you would enjoy it, and it's not going to add much to your debt/stress load, then go for it. However, if it's going to be a big drain, then the benefit you might get is not worth being more stressed now.

Yeah definitely going to disagree here. I enjoy anatomy lab for the most part and have had many TAs and staff members compliment my group’s dissections. But when you want us to find and completely clean like 20 structures in two hours, there just isn’t time to actually go over what we’ve dissected out without coming in on our own. And when we’re already in there 3 days a week and have tons of other crap on top of anatomy, that’s probably not happening.

This was for MSK though. Just looking at our schedule for CPR, it looks like it will be better.

 

[kraskadva]

Yeah definitely going to disagree here. I enjoy anatomy lab for the most part and have had many TAs and staff members compliment my group’s dissections. But when you want us to find and completely clean like 20 structures in two hours, there just isn’t time to actually go over what we’ve dissected out without coming in on our own. And when we’re already in there 3 days a week and have tons of other crap on top of anatomy, that’s probably not happening.

This was for MSK though. Just looking at our schedule for CPR, it looks like it will be better.

That's fine, but kinda still speaks to my point.
Take the arm for instance - it took you, what, 2-4 hrs? more? to skin and seperate things before you could really start identifying, right? I can skin, clean, and separate an arm in under half an hour. Leaves plenty of time for identifying everything. But I've done *a lot* of dissections at this point. I don't blame anybody for being slow, especially their first time through, but the overwhelming majority of complaints I've heard about not having enough time to get it all done in lab stem directly from hesitancy &/or poor dissection skills.
And then the same students get in the habit of bouncing immediately after they've gotten everything dissected out in MSK, and not spending the time to really identify it. So then when it comes to CPR or abdomen and the dissections are quicker, they still bounce when the dissections are done, and have the same complaints about not enough time to learn, even though they do in fact have the time.
A passing familiarity both with the tactile skills of dissection and the terminology of anatomy speed up both of those processes dramatically.

Also, pro-tip for anybody studying anatomy at any level - don't try to just brute force memorize the names of structures. Look up the latin roots of the names. 90% of them are telling you exactly where the thing is or what it does or occasionally whimsically describing it.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

That's fine, but kinda still speaks to my point.
Take the arm for instance - it took you, what, 2-4 hrs? more? to skin and seperate things before you could really start identifying, right? I can skin, clean, and separate an arm in under half an hour. Leaves plenty of time for identifying everything. But I've done *a lot* of dissections at this point. I don't blame anybody for being slow, especially their first time through, but the overwhelming majority of complaints I've heard about not having enough time to get it all done in lab stem directly from hesitancy &/or poor dissection skills.
And then the same students get in the habit of bouncing immediately after they've gotten everything dissected out in MSK, and not spending the time to really identify it. So then when it comes to CPR or abdomen and the dissections are quicker, they still bounce when the dissections are done, and have the same complaints about not enough time to learn, even though they do in fact have the time.
A passing familiarity both with the tactile skills of dissection and the terminology of anatomy speed up both of those processes dramatically.

I’m not sure it does. For one, I would hope that someone who has been through cadaver lab and has TAd it would be better at it than an MS1 doing it for the first time (although tbh that actually isn’t always the case because some of our TAs are not that good).

Second, it takes us longer on some labs than others. We like to take our time and do a good job, plus we have to stay the whole time anyway for the mandatory debrief at the end. So we try to finish fast but without just destroying the structures so we can try to do some learning. But it’s hard when you are dissecting out structures you’ve never seen in a body before.

And third, like I said. My dissection skills are good. Our cadaver has been used as an example for multiple things and we’ve had lots of compliments from the staff. So it’s not because I suck at dissection. It’s because they want us to learn two dozen structures in a lab when it takes most of the lab just to get the structures visible and clean. Pretty much me entire class feels this way, so unless our whole class just sucks, I doubt it’s that.

For CPR, we only have anatomy half the module and the labs seem like they will give us more time to actually learn the structures.

Also, pro-tip for anybody studying anatomy at any level - don't try to just brute force memorize the names of structures. Look up the latin roots of the names. 90% of them are telling you exactly where the thing is or what it does or occasionally whimsically describing it.

Definitely agree with this.

 

[kraskadva]

I’m not sure it does. For one, I would hope that someone who has been through cadaver lab and has TAd it would be better at it than an MS1 doing it for the first time (although tbh that actually isn’t always the case because some of our TAs are not that good).

Second, it takes us longer on some labs than others. We like to take our time and do a good job, plus we have to stay the whole time anyway for the mandatory debrief at the end. So we try to finish fast but without just destroying the structures so we can try to do some learning. But it’s hard when you are dissecting out structures you’ve never seen in a body before.

And third, like I said. My dissection skills are good. Our cadaver has been used as an example for multiple things and we’ve had lots of compliments from the staff. So it’s not because I suck at dissection. It’s because they want us to learn two dozen structures in a lab when it takes most of the lab just to get the structures visible and clean. Pretty much me entire class feels this way, so unless our whole class just sucks, I doubt it’s that.

For CPR, we only have anatomy half the module and the labs seem like they will give us more time to actually learn the structures.




Definitely agree with this.

But that is the point - you get better through repetition. I was already good at dissection before med school because I'd done hundreds of animal dissections and assisted with a few dozen autopsies. I got better after doing/assisting 100+ cadaver dissections. For OP, prosecting a handful of cadavers would be helpful in developing dissection skills.

And of course some take longer. A hand or an eye, while much smaller, *because they're much smaller*, would take me a hour or more to do thoroughly. But watching someone take 3 hours to pick off arm fat with tweezers when it can all be shucked by hand in under 10 min is painful. And could be avoided if people understood tissue planes. But everybody universally skips that part in the textbook/lecture, because it doesn't show up on the exams. Yet it's one of the more important concepts in practical medicine - surgery, trauma, ID, oncology staging, etc. all need this.

I'm not trying to insult your dissection skills. I'll take your word for it, but having been both on the student and teacher side, most folks are not good at it. Mostly because it's the first time, but also because they haven't yet learned to put the instruments down and just use their hands.
Pretty is great for learning, but most bodies you encounter will not be pretty and you still need to identify things. So knowing your landmarks cold is more important that getting that one structure perfectly clean.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

I'm not trying to insult your dissection skills. I'll take your word for it, but having been both on the student and teacher side, most folks are not good at it. Mostly because it's the first time, but also because they haven't yet learned to put the instruments down and just use their hands.
Pretty is great for learning, but most bodies you encounter will not be pretty and you still need to identify things. So knowing your landmarks cold is more important that getting that one structure perfectly clean.

Oh yeah I get you. I use my hands a lot. I was an OR tech and a first assistant before med school so I get tissue planes (as much as a med student can). I just like to take my time on the actual structures. But cleaning fat and dissecting the planes shouldn’t take a ton of time if you know what you’re doing.

 

[Oedipa Maas]

I think it would definitely be helpful to have some familiarity with the process. Honestly I really enjoyed dissection and I wished I had taken the opportunity to do it as an undergrad purely because I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I were better at it//had prior experience. However, most of your classmates will not have had prior experience so while it may be helpful, it's not like it will make or break you and you will certainly not be alone if your first exposure is in medical school. It sounds like this is your last semester. Take classes you really want to take. If that's anatomy - great, enjoy and know that it may prove useful for medical school! If it's underwater basketweaving, also great, this is one of your last opportunities to do that in a formalized setting before med school!

 

[OchemOficionado]

Anatomy took up most of my time. About 12 hours a week in lecture or lab and then outside study time. If you’re that interested, I say take it as a strong or recent background may allow you to focus more on your other courses.

 

[VincentAdultman]

Take it if you have an interest in Anatomy; but dont think it's going to give you a real leg-up in med school.

 

[bceagle411]

nope. you learn the important stuff for anatomy after all the cadavers are dissected and you go around looking at different bodies, not during dissection.

unless you're gunning to become an anatomy TA and get real popular with M1s who have to dissect their own cadavers (which is really just busy work. You learn nothing dissecting) there is no reason to become a master dissector

or unless you want to eventually tutor and make money during M2

 

[Angus Avagadro]

My son was an anatomy prosector for 2 yrs in college. He felt it helped as many above noted with dissecting efficiency and anatomy was not so daunting for him.
I think there is value in dissection, but with 3 D software, not mandatory. My son wants to do a sports medicine fellowship and he believes the extra time was beneficial.
So if you're interested in sports medicine, rads, or surgery, I would give it consideration.

 

[CherryRedDracul]

Do it if you think you'll like it.