Participating in the gross anatomy cadaver lab my first semester of PA school was, I must admit, a difficult experience, for several reasons. When you first walk into the cadaver lab, you are inundated by the smell of formaldehyde. The smell permeates through your clothes, your shoes, into your hair, and never seems to go…
Category Archives: Physician Assistant Student
Knowing Your Patients and the Art of Medicine
Art and creativity are inseparable. They are intimately connected. In no way is it creative to simply funnel patients through, check off labs, reorder the same prescriptions, and set up the same follow-ups. But this is what can happen when a rushed internist or family medicine physician assistant sees 30 patients a day. The practice…
New Study Shows Exercise Changes Your DNA
We all know the countless benefits of exercise, but can it really affect a person at the molecular level? According to a new study, yes it can! With exercise, there are fewer methylations of the nucleotides of DNA, affecting gene expression. The researchers obtained biopsies from healthy, but sedentary, men and women after acute exercise….
Tools of the Trade: 10 Things You Need for Rotations
Luke Skywalker has a lightsaber. Batman has a utility belt. You have a white coat. Here are some things you should carry in it: 1. Stethoscope- A no-brainer for anyone attempting a physical exam, don’t get caught without one on a medical rotation. You need this piece for any heart and lung exam and it…
What do YOU think about Didactic Year?
As I finish almost two weeks back at school, I have realized that unfortunately, my much-needed Christmas break following an intensely stressful finals week is indeed over. Nonetheless, it is definitely a relief to have one semester behind me. But now it’s back to the grind, jumping right into EKG, patient assessment, pharmacology, clinical psychiatry,…
Changing Education Paradigms
The essence of education is to help individuals be successful in life and to positively contribute to society. How can this be better accomplished than by helping students find their passions and developing their talents for those passions? Dead is the age where we must force upon every student proficiencies across multiple domains…
The Surgeon General’s Visit: A Reflection
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin honored the PA profession last week by speaking at the Yale Physician Associate Program’s graduation ceremony. In her speech, Dr. Benjamin encouraged students to view patients as complete people and consider all of the obstacles they face. She recalled individual patients throughout her career and their complicated social issues….
Six Second ECG – Dynamic Cardiac Rhythm Simulator
Lately I’ve been working to build up the new PhysicianAssistantED.com links library. This morning I stumbled across this jewel of a link that helps students learn ECG rhythms (or clinicians review ECG rhythms). In a nutshell, it provides descriptions of several cardiac rhythms and arrhythmias and challenges the student to identify them correctly. It also…
NEW Links Libraries
Some say we live in the information age. I believe this is true. However, I believe to this point we have only witnessed the early dawn of the information age. As we step further into the future, as processors become more powerful, as software becomes more user-friendly, and as innovators continue to make leaps in…
Tools for Surviving the First Semester!
PA programs have some variation in terms of which classes you take your first semester, but I wanted to share a few resources that have been immensely helpful to me in two of the hardest classes in the first semester at UTMB—Pathophysiology and Clinical Medicine. When you’re starting out PA school, there are so many…