Graduates and the clinic that we love so much

My medical school takes great pride in admitting graduate entrants into the medical program. (It is the only medical school in the country that does) It is true that it  adds a sense of excitement and flavour to the mix with all of the new points of view, but hell, some of them are just weird. It is fun to playfully mock them though. Today we had the ever popular "Wife beater wednesday". It might be a hit at main campus, but not so much here.

Then there are the graduate trends:

1. Wearing sunglasses on top of your head, indoors.
2. Blocking staircases ["How many people with a degree does it take to block a staircase?"]
3. Pointing out mistakes that are obvious (like mistakes with dates) to the lecturer (though this is only one person in particular)

This week has been really hard on me, especially when I finally realised that the clinic is not all that it is made out to be. Every week the students run a clinic for anyone that wants to come (though it is mainly for the homeless that have a soup kitchen there). On monday evening I did intake and met a well-dressed individual. Although it is part of the social history that I am meant to take, I made a point to ask where the person was working. He said that he was actually studying a masters and working part time at the university. Once I had completed the intake we were taught clinical skills and I proceeded to run into him downstairs. We practiced clinical skills on the patients waiting, in the hope that it would perhaps speed up the line. When we were finished, the man asked why lymph nodes became swollen. A fifth year student proceeded to explain that it was the body fighting against "goggas" in the body.

This really made me angry because I felt that it was extremely condescending toward the patient in question. He was educated, and yet he was still being treated like a child. I concede that many patients do not know much about medicine, but, in my eyes, there are different levels of medical knowledge. There are levels which I don't even understand. Many medical students seem to think that there are just two, that level that medical students learn, and the dumbed down, public level. I honestly don't care if some of the patients there are homeless, many of them are immigrants that have degrees, in engineering and the like, that have not been able to find jobs here. In my opinion, if you can teach someone the mechanism of how something works, they are more likely to understand it in the future. We are not trying to create a stupid society that doesn't know what is going on, we are trying to educate society as a whole. I have even explained to someone how the reading of blood pressure works.

It is perhaps because I did intake on this person that I took the initiative to explain to him exactly how lymphadenopathy occurs. I might not have found out more about him if I had not done intake. It just distresses me that it is not the first time that this has happened, other patients are also sometimes left out of the loop. Perhaps many of the other medical students there have been around a lot of patients and have distanced themselves from all of them. Perhaps that is something that I still have to learn.

But for now I will take pleasure in giving them knowledge that they can take away with them. It's not much, but it's something.