A Med School Memoir

So in the rush to prepare for my test last week, I failed to mention the awesome diversion that I had to suffer through a couple days before the test.  My school has started doing this thing called “Professionalism Clinic” as part of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine class.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel that ICM is a useful class, and a lot of the time it’s the only thing putting the “med” in the first two years of med school.  It’s the class where we learn how to do all the physical exams and stuff that will be the bread and butter of our time on the wards in third and fourth years.  But this class was absolutely ridiculous.

Let me set the scene for you.  After making something like 1200 flashcards, and trying to learn more information than can possibly stay in my brain, I was understandably stressed out.  I spent much of last week walking around so tightly wound that if someone walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder without warning me first, I probably would have shrieked in terror, spun around, and punched them in the face.  I’m not bragging here–just trying to explain how uptight I was from the stress of the looming exam.

So, as if the stress of the test wasn’t bad enough, they added another highly stressful event to the mix.  This so-called “Professionalism Clinic.”  The basic premise behind the professionalism clinic was that we will be expected to retain our composure in even the most stressful situations, and in order to prepare us for such situations, they would test us on them ahead of time.

The scenarios in our professionalism clinic included “Angry Patient,” who was, as the name implied, an angry old man who immediately started yelling at me the second I walked in the door, and “Sad Patient,” whose name was slightly misleading, because she wasn’t really sad until I told her she had cancer.  Now, the patients were not patients at all, but actors, as you might expect, and the scenarios were obviously contrived.  Once I actually got into the room, it was fairly easy to deal with the pressure of being yelled at or comforting the sad lady with breast cancer.

But the real stress of this event wasn’t encountered in the clinic.  No.  It was encountered in the days leading up to the event, just knowing I was going to have to go to this stupid clinic and get yelled at.  By a fake patient.  For NO REAL REASON.  I still get angry just thinking about it.  I understand what the course planner for ICM was thinking.  Something along the lines of: “medical school and the medical profession is a stressful, so we’ll prepare the students for that stress now.”  Well, I don’t think they succeeded in preparing us for anything.  They just allowed us to walk around with added stress before an exam.  Thanks for that.

Here’s why I object to this whole exercise–it is artificial, and unlike the other stressful, artificial clinical scenarios we encounter like the breast exam and genitourinary exam, this one has no objective standards for successful completion.  Basically, we have to go into a room and act with another actor.  No real emotions are being displayed by these people, and thus no real emotions are being conveyed by the students.  Just anger at having to waste our time a day or so before a big test on getting yelled at and having our stress levels go up that much further.

Sometimes I feel like medical school is just a big indoctrination into a culture of masochists who constantly compete with one another to see how much bullshit they can endure.  The thinking seems to be something along the lines of, “well it was shitty when I was in school, so it might as well be shitty for you too.”  As I have no tolerance for enduring bullshit, I’m not incredibly fond of this aspect of medical school.

Tags:   angry people yelling at me · ICM-2 · m-24 Comments