vitum medicinus ::: a life of medicine: prescribing

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Unleash the medical students.

I just found out that, should I pass my finals and make it to third year, within just a few months I'll be able to prescribe things and order some lab tests.

Here I thought you had to be a doctor to do those things. But no, they'll be letting me and my classmates, fresh out of the pre-clinical years of med school, play doctor. With real patients.

The best part is they're giving us plenty of time between us learning how to do these things... and us actually being on the wards.

That's right. Rather than putting us in the hosptial as soon as we have written our finals, which is when we have proven that we know which lab tests to order and which drugs to prescribe....ok, well, we've really more just demonstrated that we can memorize thousands of PowerPoint sides containing millions of trivial details (example: "in UK, 1 unit is defined as 8 grams absolute alcohol = .5 pint ordinary beer")...they've chosen to give us an entire summer to forget the relevant parts of medicine before they set us on the wards.

I'll even be allowed to order some investigations without permission: X-rays, electrocardiograms, most blood tests and cultures.

Don't get too concerned, though. I won't be handing out scripts for narcotics, heart medications, or medical marijuana anytime soon (note to friends: notice that last one, and please stop asking). Here's what I will be allowed to prescribe without permission:

Non-controlled analgesics and anti-pyretics (examples: aspirin, tylenol)
Shampoos, dermatological preparations other than those containing steroids (examples: head & shoulders, pert)
Vitamins (examples: umm... Vitamin C, Flinstones multivitamins)

Okay, you're probably a lot less worried now. And I'm not sure they even call it "prescribing" - it's no secret that anyone can buy all those things at a 7-11.

Still, I'll be able to write those things in the patient's chart...me, who doesn't really know anything about medicine yet...and the nurses will actually go ahead and give it to the patient.

Those poor, poor nurses.

I'm not sure who I should feel more sorry for... the nurses? or the patients?

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Updated 7/07. If you have been my patient, identifying information about you will never be found on this blog. If you do think a story here is about you, I can assure you that is coincidental. After hearing about HIPAA and signing confidentiality forms of my own, and reinforced after I was quite stunned to read the news reports and medical blogging community response to a medical bloggers who have gotten in big doo-doo after accusations of breaching a patient's right to confidentiality in their blogs, I've decided to reaffirm that while my hospital and med-school experiences allow me to get an idea of what happens in medicine, those experiences do not end up here as they actually happened. In order to protect the identity of the patients I interact with, and to protect the opportunity for me to continue blogging, any patient and situational information published here (for example, complaints, diagnoses, age, occupation, definitely names, possibly outcome and heck, even gender) is fictional and has nothing to do with the patients I see. Most accounts written on this blog are inspired by real medical experiences but have been changed to the point that they are entirely fictional; if a post reminds you of an experience you had with a doctor, that is coincidental. I have programmed Blogger to give me a reminder to never compromise the identification of patients that I've seen whenever I am about to write a new post. You wouldn't want your personal info being posted on someone's blog in a way that a reader could figure out that it was you, and you wouldn't want to be entirely open with a physician if you knew s/he was just dying to run to his computer and tell the world about your secrets. You are welcome to read this blog as if the events depicted actually happened, since that's probably more exciting, but the patient encounters you read here never did happen.
This blog is not meant to be a substitute for consultation with a qualified medical professional. E-mail addresses I'm provided with through e-mails or comments are never distributed, sold, spammed, or abused by me. Contents are indeed copyright: this means they're the author's property, and you need prior express written consent from the author to do any of these: distributing, broadcasting, copying, copying and pasting, transmitting, altering, selling, presenting, and the like. Especially the like.

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Unleash the medical students.

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