A Little Something More

Today was the day that I get to shadow a doctor in the clinic. As usual, I had breakfast at 8:00 AM and had to be finished by 8:45 AM to walk to class. I dress professionally today so that I would fit into the hospital setting. I was so excited for this experience. When we got to class the coordinators split us into three groups: the operating room shadows, the clinic shadows, and the no shadowing bunch. There were four of us in the clinic shadow group and we were split up to two different doctors.

My clinic shadowing took place in the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital and the doctor I shadowed was Dr. Plemmons. He specializes in weight loss and he works with Jessica, who is a dietician, and Amy, who is a physical therapist to help his patient maintain healthy weight. I went with him to see this teenage girl who wanted help with her weight. He spends about forty-five minutes talking to her and asking her questions regarding her routine. After he finished with his evaluation he sends in the dietician and went to see another patient. I stayed in the room so that I could see all three parts of the process. 

Jessica, the dietician, started by asking the patient about her diet. After getting an in-depth view of what was going on, she then started suggesting some ways that the patient can start to not gain weight. I was very surprised at her suggestions. Instead of going off and telling the girl what she can eat and cannot eat, she suggested eating in moderate. Like if she was going to have a burger and fries then she should box half of it for to go before she eats so that she can eat the rest later on. And switch out regular drinks for diet lines. All the suggestions that she made was so easy that anyone can do it.

After Jessica was done, Amy the physical therapist came in to evaluate the fitness state of the patient. She did some stretch tests and some tests to measure the girl's heartbeats. Just like Jessica she did not suggest some crazy exercise routine but rather something easy. She asked that her patient walked for about thirty minutes a day and slowly increase it to one hour. She also talked about the little things that the patient could do that would make some impact such as reading while walking on the treadmill. The whole session lasted for about two hours and I was surprised that these health providers were so quick.

As we headed to lunch we meet up with the other two students and we shared experience. I was a little disappointed in my clinic shadowing. I'm interested in internal medicine so Dr. Plemmons's work did not interest me much. I however did enjoy the experience and got to see part of what working as a doctor would be like. The other students went to shadow a doctor who specializes in cardiovascular, which would have totally hit the spot for me. I learned that I would not want to work as a therapist of any kind because part of what Dr. Plemmons does is that he talks to his patients a lot about how they feel emotionally and I'm more of a doing kind of person. Of course being a doctor means that you have to talk to your patients but I don't really want to go all psychologist and such. So overall the experience was unique but I would have been completely over the moon if I got to shadowed the cardiovascular doctor.

We had two speakers for our after-lunch class. The first was Dr. Lynn Webb, who is the assistant dean for faculty development, and we talked about the Affordable Care Act. Did you know that the act have increased taxes on tanning bed and services? Because tanning beds are associated with the development of cancer and the act wants to lower health risk. He talked about how much the cost of health care has increased. For example, in 1950 it only costed $8.50 to stay a day at the Vanderbilt Hospital but now it would cost about $3,448 per night.

The second speaker was Dr. Lawrence Van Horn, he is an economist. He talked about how insurance works and how things like Medicare works. Dr. Van Horn is and will probably be the most energetic and exciting economist I know. He taught the class with lots of energy and he use really exaggerated hand gestures. He was very funny the way he talked about the economy which he referred to as a sad sad thing. Please click on this link if you want to see a very sad web page, The US Debt Clock. He said that if you take a family who makes 24,000 a year, spends 35,000 and has a credit card balance of 169,000, multiply all that by 100 million and you would have the US. I thought that was really clever and I still chuckle and kind of cry on the inside a little when i think of that. I believe that was one of the best economy lesson I have ever had or will ever have.

Today in my origami class we made some cool looking boxes and some ninja stars. Then we had free time for forty-five minutes before dinner.

Tonight was our SOFT night which i two hours of doing anything we want including the exploration of 21st Street. But instead of going our Vandy group opt to do our laundry. It made sense since we have about a week worth of dirty clothing and we would have SOFT night again tomorrow. 

Tomorrow my class will be leaning how to give physical exams to patient, I can't wait to see what that is like.