Week 2: Medical Prep Review
Hello Everyone,
I hope you have had a great week and are enjoying the sun - with only three weeks until school starts again - I trust that you are making the most of it! I have started an instagram page, so for weekly UCAT, BMAT and interview tips, check it out @The_Top_Medic. On to this weeks review:
Book of the Week: The Doctor Will See You Now by Dr Amir Khan
Whether you want to become a GP or not, I recommend this book to all aspiring doctors. Any medicine interview almost guarantees a primary care question, therefore, by beginning your answer with “From reading The Doctor Will See You Now…”, you will immediately be placed you above other candidates.
“Each day comes with its own set of challenges, but also its own set of rewards.”
This thorough book details the role of a GP, discussing tasks such as home visits (I didn’t even realise these were still a thing!), running a minor surgery clinic, and becoming a GP partner - great knowledge for aspiring GPs. However above that, it describes the difficulty of being a GP, including vulnerable and difficult patients (a story including a death threat and a panic button), chronic pain, dealing with death, Covid-19 and having difficult conversations (great advice for MMI breaking bad news).
Dr Amir Khan highlights the overwhelming struggles of being a GP with doctor suicide rates being amongst the highest in the NHS for GPs, but also the heart warming stories which keeps him empowered. This book is a true miscellany of emotions strung together by captivating stories and events.
Podcast of the Week: Unexplainable: How medicine mansplained women’s health by Vox.
If you are not familiar with “Unexplainable” you are certainly missing out. This Vox-created podcast explores scientific mysteries and unanswered questions, providing the most relevant scientific explanations. These podcasts are incredibly useful for the BMAT essay section as it keeps you in touch with science and gives you an abundance of examples.
This podcast elucidates the three main reasons for sexism in healthcare:
Due to monthly hormonal cycles, past clinical trials and studies were only conducted on men. Therefore efficacy, symptoms, and dosages were often not tested or calculated correctly in women.
As most past trials involved only men, in order to compare modern day drug efficacy, some current studies are using just men as well.
In the past, sexist cultured deemed women less able to understand medical advice, so they were often not provided with all the details of an intervention leading to a lack of informed consent.
This is resulting in a very large problem where modern medical books don’t/incorrectly list the common presentations of diseases in women. Therefore, many conditions are misdiagnosed, diagnosed too late, or go completely unnoticed. More details on sexism in healthcare are on our page: Equality and Healthcare.
Thats all for this week. If you have any comments, queries or questions please do not hesitate to get in touch: reubencordina@gmail.com or comment down below.
Enjoy your week!
