Hold her with that look in your eyes

Did you know that Nutella was the creation of Pietro Ferrero? The Ferrero company also owns the Kinder products and Tic Tac. He should be honoured with a Nobel Confectionery Prize. Nutella owns the world.

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Studying has got to be one of the reasons for people to develop a compulsive behaviour, or random chorea, or irrational out-of-the-blue laughters. If there was a million-pound prize for whoever that manages to learn every word in Kumar & Clark clinical medicine, or Burkitt’s surgery, or Ganong physiology, or Gray’s anatomy, I’ll be the first person to join the competition but I’ll probably give up after trying for one hour. I probably won’t get past the first page.

I loathe studying, memorising facts, remembering mnemonics, recalling treatment regimes.

Learning, on the other hand, is different. I love learning the principles in managing a patient, in working out the pathophysiology and the reasons for the signs and symptoms, in reasoning out the appropriate management plans, in listening to patients and subsequently tailoring plans to meet their wishes.

What examinations require of students are the former skills – remembering mnemonics, recalling treatment regimes, with some application to the questions on a piece of paper (or pieces of paper). I don’t know why written examinations are used as an instrument to gauge a medical student’s ability or competence to perform the tasks of a doctor. Perhaps they are only used as a tool to assess students’ knowledge. In that respect, it is as pointless as containing water with a sieve – the tool is irrelevant to the most important matter at hand.

At this day and age, knowledge and information can be obtained easily. Type a keyword into google and tonnes of links spring up. Every disease can be described to the most minute of finest detail.

How a person picks and chooses the information and applies it to the situation at hand is more important, and I hate the examinations currently that do not test this aspect.

How a person handles a stressful situation, an emergency, a dying patient, a grieving wife, a distressed old man, a crying infant, a child that has been vomiting for hours, a businesswoman with a breast lump, a rubber tapper with a fractured right forearm, a soon-to-be groom with an STI or a mother with a four-year-old son with leukaemia, is definitely more important than recalling the ten causes of atrial fibrillation.

End of rant.