Training to be a Physiatrist (and Beyond)

I wrote some basic information about Rehabilitation Medicine in the first post for this category. You can read that here to refresh your memory. Specialty training in Rehabilitation Medicine occurs in residency (side note: it’s called “residency” because in the past, graduate medical education required the trainees to live in the hospital – thus they […]

How does a spinal cord injury affect your body? Part 1 of 4.

There really is no short answer to this question, but I’ll try my best to present this clearly, in bite-sized pieces and an organized manner. Mobility This is the most obvious clinical problem. Any part of the body above the spinal cord injury remains normal, while parts below the injury have no movement or altered […]

FAQ for SCI: Some Frequently Asked Questions about Spinal Cord Injury

BruceBlaus, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons We briefly tackled what an SCI is on the Resources for SCI page, but here’s a bit more in-depth information. To recap: the spinal cord can be thought of as an extension of your brain – it is made of nerve tissue that runs from the base of […]

Family Medicine (or: Waking Up from a Bad Dream)

November 14, 1998 Saturday Welcome to the Journal. Sorry about the lengthiness of last issue (4 parts). 10-weeks’ worth of experiences had to be written – catharsis? Anyway, I’ve just finished a 2-week rotation in Family Medicine. People say that the Family Medicine rotation is just like waking up from a bad dream (Internal Med […]

INTARMED Program (Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine)

I referred to the Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine (INTARMED) program in a blog post about my burgeoning interest in the medical humanities, and I thought I’d write about it a bit more here. We’ll start with the basics first. Generally, Philippine medical schools require completion of a 4-year baccalaureate degree prior to entering medical school; the […]

My Medical Humanities Journey

In the post introducing the blog (WORMHOLE), I mention that I’ve thought of the sciences and arts as two separate entities, with me having one foot in the sciences and the other in the arts and hopping in an “all or nothing” way between those two. I think the best illustration for this dichotomy happened […]

Internal (Eternal) Medicine: Part 4 of 4

November 7, 1998 Saturday Finally, the last two weeks of Internal Medicine! The last two weeks in which I am supposed to study for the oral exams (you open your mouth and doctors look in for cavities ;-D) The “orals” are held on the 3rd to the last day of the 10-week Internal Med rotation. […]

Unique Issues in Performing Artists: Part 2

In the previous blog post, I wrote about unique issues surrounding performing artists and the reluctance to seek medical help. Part 2 will tackle issues that are specific to each discipline: dance, music, and vocal arts. Dancers are a special crowd. They have good kinesthetic sense – the sense of movement and knowing where their […]

Internal (Eternal) Medicine: Part 3 of 4

November 7, 1998 Saturday This is part 3 of Eternal Medicine, the emergency room. It is nothing like the clean, orderly emergency room on TV’s E.R., but it can be as fast-paced. After 4 weeks in the wards, our block moved on to the AMMU for 2 weeks. AMMU stands for Adult Major Medical Unit, […]

Internal (Eternal) Medicine: Part 2 of 4

November 7, 1998 Saturday This is part 2 of the 10-week epic called Eternal (Internal) Medicine. Please send me a note if you did not receive part 1, as I (stupidly) forget to note down which subscribers received part 1. I forgot to tell you in the last issue that during the 4-week stay in […]