Why Medical School Takes Time?

It takes about 10,000 hours of practice and study to become an expert in a subject. While graduate school typically lasts two years, medical school takes four years to complete. Why does it take so long to earn an MD? Besides extensive lectures and clinical rotations, medical school curriculum prepares you to become a physician, which requires a great deal of study and hands-on practice.

Studies have found that students need research and hands-on clinical experience to succeed as physicians. Simply put: the materials and knowledge needed to succeed in any medical career cannot be limited to less than four years. Less than that and you’ll be woefully unprepared.

After passing the USMLE, students complete 75 weeks of clinical rotations at hospitals in the U.S., Canada, and India. Although each clinical rotation only lasts a few weeks, the time spent during Clinical Sciences is the most crucial to your medical career. The more time spent with different  rotations, the more students can adjust to the latest technological advances in medicine. Students need hands-on experience since the skills they learn during these rotations can’t be taught in a classroom.

Every four to eight weeks, students enter different specialties: emergency medicine, surgery, obstetrics-gynecology, psychiatry, neurology, family medicine, and more. Each rotation provides students with knowledge about the situations they will face as physicians. The more experience they gain, the more prepared they are for what their daily lives will be like after they graduate.

When students complete their clinical rotations, they are eligible for graduation. At this point, they will have a comprehensive medical education under their belt. Medical school will give you those 10,000 hours and then some.

Source :auamed.sites.hubspot.com

3D-printed practice parts turn patients inside out

Surgeons can now see and handle the body parts they will be repairing in the operating theatre before making a single cut, thanks to 3D-printed models. The parts shown here were all used in complex reconstructive surgery on real patients. They were produced by Cavendish Imaging in London using detailed data from three dimensional CT or MRI scans. "We're making physical what was virtual," says Andrew Dawood, the company's founder. "It's something in our hands that's tactile and tangible." Andy Coghlan

                                                                           

This is the 3D-printed model of the facial bones of conjoined twins Rital and Ritag Gaboura, and the open

In 2011, British doctors separatedthe twins. The surgery was especially tricky because, unusually, the join was between the tops of the children's heads, raising the risk of brain damage or serious trauma during separation.

The lead surgeon, David Dunaway, of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, said that being able to recreate the corridor through 3D printing was the key to success. It allowed his team to see the shared internal blood vessels exactly as they would be encountered during the operation, and to experiment with the best and safest way to separate them.

corridor of the skull by which they'd been joined since birth.

In 2007, a Nigerian bank manager had most of his lower jaw shot away by robbers in Lagos. With the help

The image shows a 3D model that recreates the full jawbone, based on the parts of it that survived the shooting. From this, maxillofacial surgeon Iain Hutchison of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London was able to make sure the jawbone had the exact dimensions 'needed to fit. The part that looks like a bicycle chain is made of titanium and fixes the jaw to the man's face

of 3D printed models, surgeons were able to make him a replacement out of one of his shoulder blades. They even managed to give him a set of functioning, implant-anchored teeth in the same operation, the first time this has been possible.

3D-printed models like the one shown next to this skull are particularly helpful when a medical condition has destroyed the symmetry of a patient's body. They can serve as a template for the repairs based on the intact side.

A patient whose face was disfigured by a huge bone growth on one side of her face was given a more

For another patient, a benign brain tumour had pushed up an area of her skull. Normally, two surgeries are necessary to remove the tumour and then fit a titanium cap to cover the resulting hole. In this case, a perfectly matched, 3D-printed plastic template and cap allowed Joan Grieve of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London to cut and seal the opening in a single surgery.

symmetrical look with such a template. A nylon model of her unaffected cheek gave the surgeon, Jonathan Collier of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, a guide for drilling the surplus bone away without injuring the tissue below.

           

Above the metal hip joint nestled in this 3D-printed pelvis is a "pseudotumour" – a benign growth that can be painful and sometimes requires surgery. 

"This model shows clearly how the tumour can create pressure on major blood vessels," says Reshid Berber of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London, who uses such models to prepare for joint replacement surgery.

Source :newsscientist.com

Could you tell if you were having a heart attack?

By now, you’ve seen enough heart attack scenes that you could spot one from a mile away: There’s the gasping for air, the clasping of hands over the chest, and pain so severe the victim collapses to the floor.

It’s time to change that picture: This Hollywood-style heart attack isn’t so classic at all. In a studyof nearly 900 heart attack patients, 65 percent experienced a slow onset of symptoms, according to researchers at Trinity College in Ireland. These included chest and left arm discomfort, shortness of breath, and fatigue. Only 35 percent suffered movie-worthy signs.

Problem is, the subtler signals of ticker trouble may postpone treatment—since it takes longer to realize what’s happening. In the study, patients who experienced slow-onset symptoms received medical treatment within 3.5 hours compared to two hours, on average, for those who exhibited more dramatic signals.

“When you suffer a heart attack, it’s most likely due to the abrupt closure of an artery and the heart muscle dies over the next three to six hours unless the artery is opened by an angioplasty or clot-busting medication,” says Men’s Health cardiology advisor Dr. Prediman K. Shah. “We have a saying that time is muscle and even a 90-minute delay could be disastrous.” 

If you think your ticker is in danger, your first call should be to 911. But to help save your heart, pop an uncoated (321 milligrams) aspirin. “Chewing gets the aspirin to work faster than swallowing,” Shah says. “The medicine reduces the amount of blood clot forming in the heart artery.”

And avoid disaster by watching out for these heart attack cues that could fly under the radar:

You clam up. Your body perceives a heart attack as an acute stressor, which stimulates the fight-or-flight response and causes you to break out into a cold sweat. It can be difficult to distinguish heart attack clamming from the pre-presentation sweats, but if you have no reason to be sweating up a storm, it could be a red flag. 

You feel nauseous. Due to a parasympathetic nervous system in overdrive, nausea and vomiting can come on suddenly if a heart attack is imminent. The key here is that the signs come on suddenly—seemingly out of nowhere.

You have heartburn. During a heart attack, reduced blood flow to your arteries can simulate heartburn-like symptoms such as burning in the chest or throat and difficulty swallowing. It may look a lot like classic heartburn, but if it happens for the first time and you have risk factors for heart disease as well as nausea, weakness, or sweating, you could be having a heart attack.

 Source : foxnews.com

A research found Women must do exercise during Pregnancy that great helps for baby's brain

It’s tough to remain motivated to exercise regularly — and even more difficult with the morning sickness, extra weight, and swollen ankles of pregnancy. But moms-to-be might want to lace up their sneakers or don their swim caps. A new study finds that 20 minutes of exercise, three times a week, improves a newborn’s brainpower.  Caribbean medical schools

“If this minimal amount of activity had an impact on the brain, it is impressive,” says Dr. Rebecca Starck, the regional director of obstetrics and gynecology at the Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved with the study.

Madelyn Fernstrom, TODAY’s diet and nutrition editor, agrees. “The good news is that moderate activity —brisk walking 3 times a week — seems to have an effect, even right after birth," Fernstrom says.

"These preliminary results from the baby’s brain activity show some enhancements in the mom-exercise group compared to the sedentary mom group.”

Experts have long suspected that regular exercise affects fetal neural development -- animal studies have shown it. But the researchers at Université de Montréal wanted to see if the effects looked the same in humans. Caribbean medical university

“My lab has been looking into exercise in kids and the benefits for their brains and in school for a while now,” says Élise Labonté-LeMoyne, a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal. The research is being presented Sunday at the Neuroscience 2013 Congress in San Diego. 

They decided to take their research a step further to see how mom’s activity influenced her baby’s cognition. Labonté-LeMoyne and her colleagues examined two groups of moms, 18 women total, starting in their first trimester and ending when their babies were between eight and 12 days old. 

The researchers randomly assigned the women to either a sedentary group, with no exercise, or an active group, where they exercised at least 20 minutes a day, three days a week, for a total average of 117 minutes per week. Eight women remained inactive and 10 women exercised by walking, running, swimming, or doing anything that raised their heart rates.

After the women gave birth, Labonté-LeMoyne and her colleagues used an EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain near the scalp, to record brain activity. The researchers wanted to see how the newborns’ brains responded to a beeping noise when it suddenly changed in pitch. The children of mothers who exercised responded more efficiently — and in a more advanced manner — than the children of the sedentary moms.

“If [the babies] are able to discriminate sound better, it will be good when [they] learn language and speak and [they can] learn words so [they] can shape the sounds better. You can see in the exercise data that they are more advanced to determine [sound differences],” Labonté-LeMoyne says.

And, she noticed that moms who exercised just felt better. While pregnant they reported less severe morning sickness and after baby, they seemed to recover faster and sleep better.

“The overall health of well-being of the mom transfers over to the well-being of the baby,” says Starck. Moms that exercise during pregnancy gain a healthy amount of weight, have babies with healthy weights, experience less postpartum depression, and sleep better.

“It does not have to be going to the gym; it does not have to be major," Starck says. "A 20- to 30 minute-brisk walk [is enough]. That’s encouraging.” 

“We had a couple of women who went to belly dancing class and show shoeing … we did have quite a few who did some weekly yoga. If it was under the intensity threshold [then] we did not count it simply because it [activates] a different pathway,” Labonté-LeMoyne says.

Yoga doesn’t make the heart beat fast enough to be considered aerobic. But, she says women shouldn’t toss out the yoga mat — there is evidence that women who practice while pregnant have calmer babies that sleep better. caribbean university

“I think that what [this study] does is that it confirms and can reaffirm moms [that] staying active and healthy during pregnancy is good for mom and baby,” says Starck. When she was pregnant with each of her four children, she’d bike or run three to five miles several times a week.

Source: NBC News