Rheumatology and Surgical techniques.

Well blog number 3 I was gonna quit this due to lack of time but I will try to push ahead, mainly due to my sister encouraging me.

On last tuesday we started a new Internal medicine practice. If I would try to explain it with my words. It would be that for me Internal is how I always imagined medicine, doctors diagnosing, just wards and patients and history taking. Just like Dr. House except less grumpy and less weird diseases. We already finished 4 weeks of Immunology. Immunology is when the body starts attacking itself, a so called auto immune disease, the body usually produces antibodies to ward off infections and other invading factors, but in auto-immune diseases they go after the body itself. But now we have started Rheumatology that focuses on the joints, soft tissue and connective tissue(bones). We had really good doctors showing us what happens how to diagnose and do an physical examination. We examined one patient that had osteoarthritis. It is a degenerative disease of the cartilage and even the bone. The patient had pain and stiffness in the joints of distal phalanges, knee and shoulders. When we examined her we saw an really distinct bone growth coming out from her distal phalanges, she also had a so called crepitation, a clicking feeling in the knee joint. Next week we will go into Rheumatoid Arthritis and the physical examination.

I also started a surgical elective, so called Surgical Operative Techniques. Last semester we took Basic Surgical Techniques so this is a continuation of that subject. Since I am thinking of becoming a surgeon I am trying to take as many elective courses that have anything to do with surgery. This course is a prerequisite of further surgery subjects, like Laparascopic surgery, Microsurgery and Robotic surgery. Today we learned some knotting techniques, like the vienna knot, instrumental knot and some others. They probably have different names depending on where they are being taught. You can search for surgical knots on youtube if you are interested in seeing how this knots are performed.

Internal

Well this little experiment continues. So today we had a hungarian class, which isn’t my strongest forte. This language is hard but still something I would be willing to learn, but when studying all the other more important subjects this one seems be put on hold. But after that we had internal the topic for today was vasculitis. Our teachers in internal are great. For each class there are certain diseases which we go over, with our teacher. Then he presents us with a patient suffering from that disease, and gives us the opportunity to ask questions. Since vasculitis can be a rare condition we didn’t have any patient but instead we went up to the ward’s to exam and interact with patients. Here in Hungary it can be quite difficult do to the language barrier but we somehow try to manage.

We also had an exam in Microbiology. Here in hungary they have so called self controls, which are just normal tests but usually there are some exemptions to be earned for example, in this subject we get an exemption from so called minimals. Which are about 200-250 mini questions that we have to answer before advancing to the final exam. Maybe not the most eventful day but hopefully it will get more interesting in coming weeks.

Lifewithmedicine

This is an experimental feature which I am trying out. My name is Bjartur Sæmundsson I am from Iceland and I am currently studying medicine in Debrecen, Hungary.

After taking an elective course in my school “internet in medicine” I decided that I wanted to try to blog about my studies. I already have a personal blog about my life but this is supposed to be something totally different. I want to mainly focus on my studies and on what I see and experience as a medical student.

So I should maybe start with the subjects I am taking. This semester I am taking

• Pathology
• Clinical Biochemistry
• Clinical Physiology
• Internal Medicine(Immunology and Rheumatology)
• Hungarian
• Microbiology
• Psychology
• Internet in medicine(elective course)
• Surgical Techniques(elective course)

So this is my timetable. The red text means seminars which are compulsory, and lectures are black. Since I have an attention span of about 20 min I choose not to go to lectures and instead study by myself. So far that has worked out good.