NBS National Board Reviews for Part II Boards & CCAT!

Tri-7 Wk7 Day 430, Thursday

Our classes for the next four days are being replaced with Board Reviews. We hit it today from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Our instructor, Dr. James is absolutely fantastic. The man has an alphabet of letters behind his name - BS, MA, DC, DAAPM, NMD, LCP. I'm not even sure what half of them mean!

It looks like Part II is analogous to the USMLE Step 2 that the med students take. Our instructor described the exam and "hairy and ugly" I did get a cool comment posted by a student living over in the UK who was looking for Rickettsiae. Last year there was a med student from the UK who had some great post on YouTube dealing with saltatory conduction.

It's hard to remember everything we covered today. I know we ended with OBGYN and I learned plenty about the placenta. We covered things like cystocele's and rectoceles which I'd seen live pictures of from in our Physical Diagnosis class last semester but some of the drawings we saw today really helped to solidify that knowledge a little more. I do very well with simple drawings to help initially get concepts. With the female we have the bladder, then vagina, then rectum all next to each other and in that order when viewed laterally. When the bladder herniates into the vagina we have a cystocele and when the rectum herniates into the vagina we have a rectocele. We also saw how the uterus can prolapse or protrude out of the cervix, especially with multiparous (multiple birth) females.

I think my favorite part of the OBGYN was when I got to see the space available for a live birth. On a lateral xray view of the pelvis, a line is drawn from the front and top part of the sacrum to the top of the pubic symphysis and that's called the conjugate line and that's the space that a baby would have available to fit through. It's just one of those things I'd been wondering about and was happy to get educated on it :)

We also covered a chiropractic adjusting technique called the Gonstead method named after Clarence Gonstead. This reminds me that sometimes I'm asked how much money a chiropractor makes. There's no definite answer to that since most chiros have independent businesses. Some don't make any money and have to find other means of support while others are amazingly successful. Clarence Gonstead was one of the very successful ones. Dr. Gonstead's office was so large that half of it contained a 28 room hotel while the other half was for treating patients. His office also included swimming pools, tennis courts and a full sized golf course. His house was equally amazing. I saw an over head view of his home in a class last week. The teacher pointed out one building which had his indoor pool which then led to his outdoor pool. His back yard consisted of a landing strip and six airplanes that he owned. I'm thinking the man must have been doing something right and must have helped a LOT of people in order to build up such an empire.

A very interesting thing our teacher conveyed was when he talked about one of his patients who shared the fact that he and his wife had recently been approved for adoption. They had been seeing conventional doctors for six years in an attempt to get pregnant but finally conceded defeat. Our teacher, Dr. Cranwell, suggested he bring his wife in to see if he could help. Obviously, helping women get pregnant isn't something most people think of when they think of a chiropractor but, the mans wife did come in and after an xray evaluation they found that the womans pubic symphysis was offset to one side by 22mm! (nearly an inch, for my American friends) ;)

Dr. Cranwell treated the lady for a few weeks to help correct this misalignment and shortly after that her husband came in the office and was very upset. It seems corrected that misalignment may have solved their problem and the lady ended up being pregnant with Triplets and this was in addition to the child they had already agreed to adopt! Probably a good problem to have :)

We also learned that sometimes chiropractic adjustments can help with cryptorchidism which are undecended testes. This usually occurs with the 2nd part of the sacrum is displaced anteriorly.

The big things we usually hear about in school regarding what chiropractic helps are things like asthma and enuresis (bed wetting). It's kind of odd because once we get licensed as a real doctor then we seem to be limited in how much we can share that information. I know my brother got in trouble a number of years ago when we shared that kind of information in an advertisement and had to drive up to Chicago to face a disciplinary board.

Wow! I just went off on an Internet tangent but it was rather interesting. I noticed the NBCE (National Board of Chiropractic Examiners) now has a CCAT link. A Chiropractic College Aptitude Test. This makes me wonder how far away Chiropractic colleges are going to be from simply offering a combination DC/MD degree program.

I'm glad the standards are being raised. I'm reminded of the Boston Marathon and when that organization first started to impose requirements for getting into the race. The race officials originally wanted to be able to limit the number of entries but the challenge ended up making the race more appealing so entrants just went up! We need that with chiropractic. There are about 60 to 70,000 chiropractors in the United States and about 400,000 Physical Therapist. We hear time and time again how well organized the PTs are not to mention how proficient they are at their job. I'm hoping the chiropractic profession can eventually learn from them.

Being almost 70% through the program now I can see that becoming a chiropractor basically means learning all the stuff you'd expect a conventional doctor, such as an MD to learn and then learning how to adjust on top of that. As far as what we do, I'd say there are two things. One, we diagnose and two, we adjust. The diagnosis can be anything under the sun and the adjustments may be with any two articulating bones in the body.

My god ...it's almost 1 a.m. and I still have to finish a quiz for Applied Kinesiology that's due at 6:30 a.m. I better get moving.

Today's picture is a cut-away side view of a pregnant lady 28 weeks along. I added a line to show the conjugate line and hence, the space available for the baby to pass through ....not that the cervix doesn't have a whole lot of dilating to do as well. Yowza! (kind of glad I'm a guy) ;)