As part of a translational research course we're taking in the first summer of our MSTP, we're spending a few days going through the major clinical specialties. We started in pathology, went through pediatrics, and are now doing medicine. The morning is typically devoted to showing the clinical side of things, while the afternoon is spent listening to several research talks from people in the department so that we can get an idea of the kind of research people in that deparment do. It's a wonderful idea, I think, because I can get a sense of what doctors do in a clinical setting, which was definitely a mystery to me before this and upon second thought may actually still be, because the impression I get is that doctors go to a large number of meetings every day, which I'm not entirely sure is accurate or not. Also, I've been getting a sense of the kind of research people do here and the atmosphere in which they do it in.
We've spent these past two days in internal medicine, and during this time we've seen some amazing things. What comes to mind first is radiology. Man, those people can look at smudgings in gradients of black, white, and gray and see actual things. It's like magic. Today we went to the GI/Oncology multidisciplinary conference during which patient cases are reviewed by a number of difference specialists. Typically (I say typically, but really, I was only there once), someone starts presenting a case: "So and so presented with this and that..." They go through the patient's history, current problems, labs, and radiology. Then at some point they will decide whether the tumor is operable or not. At this point, they show X-rays and CT scans on the screen. X-rays are single images, but CT scans are dozens, if not hundreds, of pictures of sections taken at tiny intervals down the body. When they show CT scans, they flip through rapidly, so it's like watching a film of the inside of the body as you travel from neck to waist. As they look at these pictures, they say things about the tumor like, "That's a really bad one," or "it's totally wrapped around this or that," and I won't see ANYTHING. There is NOTHING on that screen that makes sense to me. They're doing something totally beyond me to glean information from those pictures. And it's both strange and amazing to think that in 8 years (give or take a year), I'll be able to at least see the structures they're pointing out inside that greyish blur, and it won't seem like magic anymore, but merely a trained eye.
