It feels surreal that this is the last clinical correlations reflection of didactic year. Thinking back to the first semester of PA school to the first semester of clinical correlations to right now, my classmates and I have come a long way. In the beginning, I was quite uncomfortable with presenting and I was hesitant in asking questions during our sessions. However, with weekly presentations and increased practice, I am now confident in my ability to deliver information that is accurate and concise in a credible manner. I also found myself asking more questions and being more involved in the conversation verbally as opposed to internally thinking about it. It has also been less challenging to find articles and understand them to ultimately support my presentation since that was more difficult during the beginning of the first semester of clinical correlations. I found that UpToDate was especially helpful in addition to PubMed so I will continue using those resources going forward into clinical year.
After my classmates commented about my presentation style, I learned that I am able to deliver information and present in a calm and organized manner. In my previous experience with triaging or taking patient history, I found that I was able to calm patients down in a similar manner and reduce the amount of anxiety that they felt, so I thought this was interesting as it translated into other areas as well. In terms of the content of this class, I thought that each case was relevant to what we were learning. The different teaching styles of the professors were refreshing as it taught us how to think on our feet in addition to taking a step back and looking at the big picture. One thing I might tweak is the timing of the cases. There were times where we did not learn much about a topic so we struggled to ask relevant questions when taking the history or failed to answer the professor when they asked us questions. I would advise future students to take advantage of clinical correlations. This is the type of class where how much you learn or how much you benefit is from what you make of it (similar to what we’re being told for our rotations). Because of the smaller class size, it’s okay to ask questions frequently or make mistakes. You can try to prepare for your presentations last minute or not engage or participate in the conversation as much but you won’t be taking advantage of an otherwise, very valuable class.
As always, Dr. Davidson still amazes me in bringing something new to the table during each clinical correlations case. For example, even though we learned about polypharmacy in our primary care class, having a geriatric case solidified the idea that drug-drug interactions may cause a patient to present with something that they may not have (like diabetes in our case). In managing a geriatric patient or any patient with an extensive list of medications, I learned to take a step back and consider lab values, clinical presentations, medications, and other factors in relation to each other as opposed to separate entities. Medicine is multifaceted and our thinking and approach to managing and treating patients should reflect as much. This type of thinking is different than how I thought in the beginning of PA school, which was more straight forward so I am grateful to all my professors for guiding me thus far.
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