WILTIMS #379: Family Medicine orientation and video torture

Today was the first day of my fourth and final clerkship of the fall semester: family medicine. People are often confused by what this "specialty" is; essentially, it is what a general practitioner does. There is a lot of overlap with internal medicine, but more emphasis on preventative care and chronic illnesses.

For some reason our orientation day for this clerkship was particularly intensive. We were on campus for about 12 hours between a full day of lectures and a medical errors clinical skills session. One of the lectures was on the diagnosis and treatment of hypertension. A few minutes into the lecture I googled the national standards and realized that the whole subject could be summarized by the following flow chart.

Image from JAMA

Pretty simple, really.

During the evening session we had a standardized patient encounter where we apologized for a medical error that we committed, as told to us in a one page prompt. We then gathered in small groups and had to watch the video replays of each other's encounters. It was a very special sort of torture.

Quote of the day: (Paraphrased from a talk by the Chairman of Internal Medicine) "The problem with cross-sectional research is that it only takes a snapshot of a population at one time point. If you do this in Miami, you might conclude that people are born hispanic and die Jewish."

TIL: "Blessed errors" are not holy mistakes, but actually incorrect answers on a common dementia test that is for some reason named Blessed. After a good 15 minutes of poking around the internet, I can't actually figure out whether the name came from a Dr. Blessed, a Blessed Hospital, or something else. If anyone reading this knows, leave the answer in the comments!