Musculoskeletal Health Care…

Our cohort is a few weeks into the first of our eight Specialist Clinical Placements (SCPs) and 2017 is stretching out before us. Although it seems long, the time is actually going by quite quickly. I wouldn't say it's exactly fun, but I'm enjoying myself tremendously on this block and am learning a great deal.

My first rotation is the MSK block (musculoskeletal health), which is pretty self-explanatory. In this block, we become more familiar with problems of joints, muscles and bones (and nerves and connective tissue and some skin and so many other things as well...). Many people run a mile when they think of anatomy and memorising lists of muscles and bones, but block 4 in the first year (Locomotion) was actually my favourite block and I'm loving the MSK placement. We've seen so many things that I wasn't expecting and we're only just over three weeks in.

As is probably fairly obvious, a lot of the work revolves around bones and joints - so we see fractures and their treatment, joint replacements, and that sort of thing. But of course they don't exist in a bubble - for instance, fractures are often accompanied by soft-tissue injuries and we have to know all of the repairs that come along with them. Getting a new knee or a new hip is a major operation and can take weeks or months to recover from fully. A lot of the learning we've done in earlier years around the biological, psychological and social impact of health conditions has come in very handy in understanding the lives that our patients live and how injuries might change them. It's proven incredibly applicable now that we are seeing more patients in a clinical setting than we did in the first years of the course.

I was not expecting that we'd be taught rheumatology as much in this block as we have been. It's a very diverse field and there's so much going on! The more I see of it and the more I learn about the speciality, the more interested I become. The patients are very interesting and diverse, and being an effective rheumatologist requires extensive knowledge of many branches of medicine and the ability to pull them all together very quickly. Since rheumatological diseases can affect multiple body systems, specialists in this field need to be quite broad in their knowledge and approach. We have seen patients with rheumatoid arthritis (of course) but also psoriasis (and the multiple effects that it has), polymyalgia rheumatica, systemic lupus erythematosus and several other conditions that we've only seen in textbooks before now.

I'm enjoying the block so much, I'm really gutted that it is coming to an end so soon. But of course new adventures await in the next placement, too.

John

Luke Pemberton : 26 Jan 2017 14:46 |  Tags: John Mbchb Patients Student Wards Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem