Beyond words..

One of the days when i feel like conveying instead of saying..

Why Medical Students Should Have Their Own Blogs
Posted 10/06/2006

Nich0las Genes, MD, PhD

All across the country this fall, thousands of students are starting medical school or new clerkships. Some are kids fresh out of college, while others are embarking on a second career they've always dreamed about. Still, this diverse group shares some common features:

They're going to be isolated from the life they knew before; maybe they've moved to a new city, or maybe they won't get to call or see family and loved ones as often as they used to.

They are going to experience some powerful things, such as cutting into flesh, delivering a baby, breaking devastating news, or staying awake for ungodly periods of time.

In short, this is a group that should be communicating a lot with others -- stories, perceptions, rants -- at precisely the time when such communication is most difficult.

The solution? I think they all ought to get a blog.

You know -- a Web-log, an online diary. Now, I'm not talking about those vapid MySpace pages full of classroom gossip and party pictures (although medical school provides its share of that, too). But I think the students who sit down for 20 minutes every now and then to record their impressions of the wondrous, challenging experiences they're grappling with will be doing themselves a favor. Frustrated friends and family who haven't heard from their beleaguered med school castaway will take a measure of relief in seeing an updated blog entry, even if it's a gripe about exams written at 3 AM.

But perhaps even more important is that medical student blogs are useful for students themselves. It's therapeutic to record your feelings, to vent frustrations, and to register difficult experiences. This is the kind of activity that makes for a sensitive and caring doctor -- probably the kind of doctor that most beginning students expect to be but forget about somewhere along the line. Blogging can help students remember. It's also instructive because it allows us to chart our progress through the years. On those bleak days of surgery clerkship, it may be encouraging to look back and see how far you've come since the first squeamish posts about anatomy lab.

Finally, blogging can create opportunities and open up frontiers. Beyond the simple scenarios that have helped me -- such as getting the inside scoop on hospitals during residency interview season -- getting involved with the nascent medical blogosphere can help you sift through the Web's educational resources (such as a collection of clinical cases and archived school lectures). It also can inspire student activism or show you what life is like in foreign med schools. Blogging might even open up doors into research.

my words: i agree. we're human, then our profession. no matter what people expect us to be, we will always remains human. with feelings, with attachment.

we need to source out our days, good or bad. just, like others.

we feel, we hope, we rise. just, like others.

give us space to breath and express ourselves. just, like others.