Weirdest Lectures

I'm struggling to choose between "The Physiology of Intersex" (LOTS and LOTS of hermaphrodite pictures) and "Breast Reconstruction and Enhancement" (The enhancement portion was given by by a blatantly chauvinist male surgeon who made some racy remarks that got a few of the classmates in a huff).

 

The strangest one that I've attended was probably "Testicular neoplasia" in which the repetitive message was "Guys, its good to check your testicles for both fun and to prevent testicular cancer. Girls, you make sure to check your boyfriends tonight"


Another odd experience was from a radiologist who was talking about how med school sometimes feels like you've been caught with your pants down. At that point he showed us a picture of him (while younger) in some European country with only a shirt on.

 

We had a human sexuality lecture during second year, where the professor spent ten minutes telling us about how a guy once broke into his family's house and stole his daughters' underwear. Great detail was given to the kinds of underwear stolen (silk & satin taken, cotton left behind), followed by descriptions of the perpetrator's possible motivations.

 

We had a lecture on anatomy of the inguinal area...specifically the cremaster muscle and the various reflexes, notably the "stroking" reflex as our prof called it. Basically if you stroke the inner/frontal thigh areas areas, the cremaster contracts, thus raising your balls.

Our prof, who happened to be a tall, thin black woman with a deep southern accent, told all the ladies to "just stroke your men's thigh and see what happens." Many of us didn't know how to take it.

 

I found phys lecture # 8 "Transport 2: Passive" pretty steamy.

 

We had a similar lecture from a 300 year old lecturer. After the lecture all the women in the class were convinced that touching a guy's thighs will make his balls jump up and down. WTF

 

1970's porn-style vids of sex therapy:

a guy moving his kid's stuffed animal out of the way to give his wife more room on the bed

a guy with a premature ejaculation problem wiggling his butt all over the place while his superior partner (reverse cowgirl if memory serves) pushes him out and squeezes his weiner to stall the delivery

a lady with vaginismus applying dilators while the narrator says "contract, relax, contract, relax"

I also get kind of annoyed when profs excessively go over erection physiology and the mechanism of sildenafil. We get it. Dudes' pee pee's get stiff when they want to do the lay down dancing. I think we all know how it works thanks.

 

i thought my school was the only one that repeatedly went over the wonders of viagra and its accidental discovery. that, and the fact that semen has fructose in it. over and over again we've heard that. i call it academic kink.

 

Favorite line unwittingly delivered by a catholic priest/anatomy professor in class:

"You see, the clitoris is sometimes very hard to find...[description of the anatomical position]"

 

Take your pick:

1. Hostile GI doc who spent the 1st 5 minutes of his stool lecture asking us for euphenisms. The proceeded to use them all while teaching us. You should have seen the smiles on his face and the pictures from that lecture are also a wonderful memory that i'll get to carry for the rest of my life. The thing that scared me about this dude is he truly hates people and yet he lights up when he's talking about stool? There has to be something wrong here.

2. A physiologist who was teaching us physio of the urogenital system and went into exquisite detail about semen. I'm talking about appearance, smell, taste and texture. I think this one weirded me out more because this guy had always seemed semi-normal until he slipped off the deep end in the middle of the lecture: "It's a little salty but with a sweet undertone" Then he went into foods that could affect the taste and smell.

 

We have a retired DO teach some lectures in Gross Anatomy (undergrad) and he told us one day how he was looking at a chart of a 14 year old boy who was repeatedly getting the same venereal disease (I forgot the name but it seems to grow best on the tissue in or around a girl's cervix). Well this was the first time that the Doc had seen this kid so he went in to examine him an asked the kid to drop his pants...and the doctor said that his jaw dropped open and he finally realizd why this kid kept getting this VD. He then went into a lengthy (at least to me) description of how incredibly long this 14 year old's appendage was and how it was very clear now why he kept getting this VD. I think he called the kid a tripod or something. Lol, anyway, it was pretty funny and a little unsettling. But the Doc has been married for many years and he has kids, so I think he's alright.

 

Ha, we had the same lecture....but this wonderful reflex was talked about as well---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_wink

 

Hey, I've elicited the cremaster reflex. It is in fact, hilarious.

Strangest lecture in our school was an embryology lecture, where this... very strange man went into great detail about legends about what would happen if a woman had sex with a werewolf, and what offspring would result.

Never saw him after that lecture... I almost wonder if he was just a bum who wandered in off the street and started talking.

 

During Intro to Clinical Medicine, we had a colorectal surgeon read Madeline to us before he went off into a lecture about appendicitis.

We also had a video during the Human Sexuality component of ICM about things like masturbation, male-male sex, how to use sex toys, etc. Some of the guys popped some popcorn and took front row seats, making all sorts of commentary. That was one of the more well-attended lectures during the first two years of medical school---even if there were several people who were offended by the "porn" that was shown.

 

Oh, the Anal Wink reflex. We never actually went over this lecture, but i remember seeing it when i was reviewing for my OSCE using Bates. Who would have thought that the anus has a reflex, and whoever named it that had enough of a sense of humor to call is the "anal wink"

Surprisingly enough, I think we have yet to have a single lecture over the action of Sildenafil and the contents of semen....and i hope to not have one anytime soon.

 

a little off topic, but this reminded me of best question ever asked. During a gross lecture of female anatomy, by our prof who is retired and about 70, "so where's the G-spot, because I can never find it." I don't think I have ever seen a lecturer so derailed and a class out of control.

 

Haha, you mean your school didn't cover such an important aspect of female sexuality?

Honestly I think our school did - although it was mentioned in passing and not exactly pointed to on a drawing.

 

We had a lecture on envenomations one time. A whole lecture devoted to snake and spider bites. Not sure how common that is--probably depends on what part of the country you live in.

 

This morning we had a lecturer go over by 4 minutes, the course director was sitting near the back and disconnected the projector, effectively ending the lecture (preventing it from going to 10 minutes over which is the way things were looking based on the number of slides left). Mad points to the course director.

 

While that is kinda funny, isn't rather rude? Besides, the material will probably be on the test regardless.

 

The projector is hidden in a media room in the back of the lecture hall so he couldn't directly observe what had happened, just that the powerpoint was no longer on.

They were also from the same department and know each other well. The lecturer joked that "He guessed he have to put in another quarter" and then told us to have a good afternoon.

Edit: Upon further investigation turns out the bulb on the projector broke so they moved some afternoon classes out of that auditorium. The timing was just fortuitous. The course director was walking out of the media room after having entered to investigate why the projector stopped. So, points to the projector.

 

Differential for nightime seizures in a 4 year old girl?

Mastubation

 

Heh, serendipitous timing for the life of that bulb I guess.

 

Human Sexuality and Reproductive Development is the block I'm in right now.... every day I wake up and think "Lets talk about sex, baby, lets talk about you and me, lets talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be, lets talk about sex." Its been an interesting few weeks.

 

a human behavior lecturer recently went into excruciating detail how constipated encopresis works. i think i'm forever scarred since listening to that.

 

Next week we have listed on our schedule the following two lectures:

Complementary and Alternative medicine in psychiatry (meh)

and, get this...

Yoga and Psychiatry (WTF?)

 

I'm such a flake that that sounds like fun.

 

Please tell me these aren't mandatory attendance. Maybe they are just trying to prepare you for a career serving scientologists?

 

I actually think that medical school needs to have some CAM so I can understand the potentially dangerous non-evidence based medicine my pts are using.

 

That's true, but you could also see where it might be potentially useful. For example, I can't really think of examples where yoga would be harmful -- it might not solve a problem, but I don't think it would make it worse.

In our nutrition section of biochem, they talked about safe and dangerous herbal supplements. I can see where that would definitely come in handy. Our patients are going to take herbal supplements and try other things, so we have to know what's going on with it.

 

I agree, I think yoga is probably pretty good for just about anybody. I'm just wondering what argument they are going to make for the use of yoga in psychiatry.

"This patient presented with the chief complaint of voices in their head. Our plan is 3 weeks of daily Ashtanga."

 

On a serious note, there's some book out about using yoga as a treatment for depression. I haven't looked at it at all so I can't comment on its quality. Also, yoga and other types of meditation are useful for stress and anxiety disorders. Yeah, I don't think it'd be too effective for people who are psychotic.

Anyway, it seems about as valid to me as lots of stuff we talked about in our psych class. Heck, I'd prefer a yoga session to another class about spirituality in medicine or an unscientific lecture about the perils of weed. I am hoping it's not required, though.

 

I don't know about yoga, but a lot of studies have been done on the effects of various kinds of meditation on the body. Just because it's not a chemical doesn't mean it can have no effect, so don't be so dismissive of something that could potentially help people.

 

I just heard a story on NPR about yoga sessions significantly helping war veterans with PTSD.

 

Oh, here's another one:

I'm in lecture right now, and the lecturer just showed us a clip from Star Trek: Voyager to illustrate a point about HMO issues.

 

In anatomy lecture:

Abdominipelvic Cavity: "Semen has the smell of chestnut" I mean, WTF has that to do with anatomy? And the lecturer always emphasizes the word "peeeniss".

In histology lecture:

Lecturer with high-pitched voice emphasizing the wrong letters in the words. Very irritating to listen to. Also, she doesn't make the "umm..." sound when she's trying to find a word, she says "mmmnie..." . She sounds like a german English teacher from the early 20th century.

 

Cerebellar lesions cause ipsilateral wobbly downward dog.

 

And damage to the supplementary motor system causes trouble in sequencing sun salutations.

 

Gosh, I haven't thought about this in years, but here's one: in PA school one of our GI lecturers was a particularly dashing (at least he thought so) GI doc who was dating a local TV personality (I think she was a weather forecaster? no wait, she was an RN who did health commentary on the news, that's right). They weren't doing so well and interspersed through the lecture on Crohn's, UC, achalasia, etc., he kept asking the women in the class for dating advice. He pretty much went so far as to throw out an open invitation for any interested female PA students (not sure if he cared if we were single or committed or whatever) to contact him if they wanted to "shadow him". We all thought it was a hoot. The guys in our class (all 5 of them) were so bored.

 

They'll never take me alive!

P.S. I'll give the undies back when I'm done with them. FWIW, I didn't take any that had been laundered.

 

we had a lecture, grand rounds, and another half lecture on gaucher's disease, but not a single one on cystic fibrosis all year.

the thinking behind this i think is weird, tho the lecture i guess was pretty bland

 

CF isn't very important, only one in 20 of us European descent carry a screwed up gene. There are only a couple hundred mutations, quite a few of which are spontaneous, 70% of cases carry the same mutation. So really, Gaucher's but not CF?

Please don't tell me next that they didn't teach sickle cell.

 

we learned SMA twice, even though its the second most lethal AR disease after...guess what? cystic fibrosis

of interest, we spent a total 5 minutes this ear on the nose, 10 on the middle ear, and nothing on the inner ear. nothing on meniere's disease. but a full lecture and a half on...gaucher

 

That is similar to my experience as well (ear and nose, although at least twenty minutes in gross on nose, turbinades, and getting air up to olafactory bulb). Discussed something in gross about equalizing the ear. Some muscle in the head pulls on the inner ear. Tensor Veli Tympani?

you'll probably get in neuro and path (or pathophys). They only affect smell (actually can live without), hearing (can livewithout), and balance, difficult to leave without.

 

Ok I don't have any weird med school lectures to report, however I have a college weird professor class story to share....


During the final for biochemistry, the professor sat and ate cheese and drank wine with his feet up on his desk... we were like wt..??

Also, same guy:

One of my friends went to his office during office hours to ask a couple Q's. There was the huge 1000mL beaker bubbling away on a hot plate near his window...during the middle of talking the professor all of a sudden just grabbed his bag of noodles and dropped them in the beaker. Apparently it was lunch time! This guy was a real weird duck, very animated, very mad scientist-y. He also used to cross his legs and rest them on his desk, leaning back on his chair while talking to you, and when he'd get real excited he'd use his legs to point at you, swinging them back and forth etc. So odd, haha.