Week 25: Pathology, Immunology, Allergy Begins
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So initially I thought we were done for in this block – to say that we were going to learn pathology, immunology, and allergy in six weeks? I would’ve told you that that was preposterous, until we met Dr. Grande. Dr. Grande is our dean of academic affairs, and I think the wheels and cogs behind our Mayo Medical School six week block curriculum. If there was someone who understood this new teaching paradigm and how it is supposed to be taught it was him. Dr. Grande is also a renal pathologist here and thus chaired not only this block, but also taught us most of the pathology we learned this block. To say the least (retrospectively) this block turned out to be the least stressful and most enjoyable of all our blocks thus far (well the ones in which we were learning some basic science), and it proved to be an effective demonstration of how medical school can be relatively stress-free while you actually learned something! The good news as we learned early on was that the six weeks spent now were only covering general pathology and that the organ specific pathology would be revisited throughout the next year as we move into organ system blocks starting block VII. Another nice change to our curriculum that was intended initially in our heavily didactic blocks was the availability of a free afternoon in which we could actually go study rather than sit in another class until 5:00pm. Dr. Grande made sure that at least three of the five days of the week this block were open, a much needed model that we could’ve used in histology and anatomy when days went 8 am-5pm (or later) upwards to four out of five days of the week. Since didactic blocks really aren’t the most exciting things to blog about (I could just link you to our textbook and have you read it if you really are interested), I’ll spend some of the ensuing five more weeks of this block focusing a tad about how each of the pathology, immunology, and allergy components went these six weeks, and a bit about the health behavior and introduction to the patient course that winded up more or less this block with our ability to complete a full physical exam.
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