Wednesday was a great day at school. I can tell things are shifting gears and we're no longer spending so much time with the basic sciences and are now spending more time geared towards diagnostics.
A class I was most impressed with today was Radiographic Positioning. I'm not sure of the total people in that class but we have a projected total of 63 people. Our class was divided up into four different groups so, about 16 people per group and each group meets down by four of our x-ray machines for an hour each. Not only that, once in the x-ray lab we were divided up again into three groups and each group went into an x-ray room with a teacher who went over some of the basic operations of the x-ray machine. We just had an entire semester learning about the nuts & bolts of x-ray but this is now hands on. Anyway, after about 10 or 15 minutes with the teacher we went to a different x-ray room with a different teacher who again went over everything, and then ...we went to a third x-ray room with a third teacher who went over the particulars with their x-ray machine. I was amazed at the individualized attention and the worthy repetition by these three teachers. Two of them were even DACBARs which means they had diplomats in radiology which means they had an additional three years of x-ray training after they got their doctorate in chiropractic.
Dr. Kuhn was one of the teachers down there and he's the guy who's also teaching us Diagnostic Imaging.
We also hit the ground running in our Physical Dx Lab. The teacher had two things to say at the beginning of class and that was "Gown up!" (she said it twice)
Gee, I wasn't even sure if I should bother bringing my medical bag with but, I did - however, I had no gown so, I quickly snuck out of the back of the lab room, ran up to the bookstore and bought my 7th gown! Luckily, I made it back and was gowned up as a teacher was taking attendance ...if we're not gowned up it's points off. We get 15 points each class for simply showing up but, we have to be prepared and part of that is being gowned up. The next part of being prepared came with the next directive from our teacher, we were to take out our stethoscopes, dx kit, aneroid and watch - missing any of those items results in a 5 pt attendance deduction. Heck! I didn't have a watch ...yeah, once again, I ran up to the book store. They have little clip on watches so I bought two of those (another guy from class gave me a $20 to pick one up for him) Once again, I made it back just in time to have all my equipment checked and got full credit for being in class.
Wednesday evening I went to my parents house and for the first time actually did a blood pressure reading on my parents and it was fascinating! For some reason I was always trying to hear a pulse with my stethoscope before I pumped up the cuff bladder but, I no longer think I'm supposed to hear anything at that point. I worked with my Mom first, pumped up the bladder then slowly let the air out of the cuff while listening...as the pressure went down I started to hear a pulse and the pulse got louder and louder - it was absolutely fascinating! When the pulse stopped I knew I had my diastolic reading. Both my parents got to hear the pulse as well with my stethoscope and blood pressure kit.
Our regular teacher, Dr. Guebert, has been out of the country. Apparently, he got stuck over in Spain due to some volcano that's been spouting off recently.
One interesting note from our biomechanics class was in regard to stretching and how stretching prior to exercise doesn't necessarily help to prevent injury according to recent studies. On another related point, there isn't necessarily and tissue elongation due to stretching and increased flexibility may actually be a function of a threshold being lowered specifically a lower threshold with our spindles and golgi tendon organs (GTO) Spindles are found within our muscle fibers and respond to stretch while GTOs are found in our tendons and respond to tension.
Today's picture shows the intrafusal or spindles found in our muscles along with various nerves. We studied all that stuff in neuromusculoskeletal diagnosis last trimester :)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment