Day 8: The Frustrating Thing About Healthcare....

The Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare as it is widely known), seems very complicated on the outside. Before Dr. Epright brought in her colleague Dr. Melanie Cozad, I honestly did not know much about the ACA aside from the fact that conservatives disliked it and that it was supposed to help increase coverage of uninsured Americans. After living in countries such as France and Canada that have a socialist national healthcare system, dealing with some of the hurdles of the American system has been difficult (not saying that the French and Canadian systems aren't 100% foolproof).

For sure, the ACA will either be reformed more or be abolished depending on the upcoming election but its still important to understand it now in its current state. Even though the ACA helped increase the number of Americans that had health insurance there were pros and cons to it as there are with every new nationwide system implemented. To me it seemed as if there were more pros than cons as most of the case studies we analyzed in groups seemed to prove. It will be interesting to see, however, how the American health system evolves in the next few years and how that will affect us as future medical practitioners.

The radiology was interesting, especially the picture on the left. I didn't know that hey used CXR's to detect pneumonia in patients which was very interesting! Some of the more technical information that Dr. William Hines talked about was too difficult for me to understand but it was amazing how he could look at a picture of a patients abdomen and discern what was wrong with it; the training he must have gone under to become a radiologist was probably very extensive. It seems like a field where you not only have to be good with anatomy but have to remember a large range of information when looking at a patients scan.

Our next speaker was Mrs. Susan Hartsell who works with infectious disease prevention in GHS. I remember seeing her from Tier I and really enjoyed her talk (especially the little stuffed-toy viruses she brings). Im glad that she covered the Zika virus more in-depth because there's still so much we don't know and new developments keep coming to light and its hard to keep up with what's fact and what's just a rumor on the internet. Listening to her speech also made me a little paranoid for shadowing around the hospital (especially the part about how MRSA is one of the most prevalent diseases) but I'll just keep an eye out for the hand-sanitizers laying around... It was pretty funny to watch Mark and Cameron get dressed and un-dressed as if they were visiting a supposedly ebola-infected patient. I can't believe that it usually takes forty-seven steps to get out of the scrubs in real life!

Next, we moved back upstairs to listen to our final two speakers, Dr. Bonnie Brown and Mr. Al. I enjoyed listening to Dr. Brown talk about the importance of mental health, not only as an important field that we should consider studying but also an important subject we need to reflect on ourselves. I've talked to several medical students before and the the ordeal of medical is not an easy one, as Dr. Brown also addressed. I also appreciated the Ted Talk she showed us about being aware of our own mental health and how we aren't taught at a young age to deal with those issues. It certainly is something important that children should learn. After Dr. Brown's lecture we finally had Mr. Squires talk on the importance of our decision with our major, where we study school, and how we need to put aside miscellaneous options when we make our decisions about our future. For me that talk was very important as I've had to deal with changing my major from pre-Pharmacy to Biochemistry (pre-med). Its also hard when you have your friends pulling you in one direction but that direction isn't pulling you towards your goal; you just gotta stick with your guns sometimes and do what you gotta do.

#MedExTierII