back home for the weekend!

hey guys,

i went home this weekend (decided that enough was enough, and needed a break!), using the opportunity given by the fact that our course is slightly less demanding in these last two weeks of term! also used it as an ideal chance to test out our new home cinema kit... spent most of last night working my way through our DVD collection!

anyway, i thought i'd update you on what i'm doing at the moment, academically:

neuro, pharmacology and pathology have all finished now, so we're currently doing human repro and the options subjects. in repro we've finished all the stuff on pregnancy, etc and we're now doing a bit of medical ethics and law. it's really interesting to know what you can/can't get sued for (!), but the ethical dilemmas we may come across in our professional careers are also really intriguing. a lot of the problems we come across are in fact quite complex, and range from rationing of healthcare to the ethics of research, and in order to solve them we need to employ various ethical theories, which you'll soon enough learn about!

my options, on the other hand, are also pretty interesting. in 'use and abuse of janus drugs' the first lecture was on the use of drugs in sport, and it was amazing to learn how drug use has been going on since the old olympics/games in like 400 BC! then we moved on to the mechanisms and control of pain, which in some places overlaps what we've already learnt in the many neuro course anyway (but is definitely good to go back and go through again!)... in 'man, molecules and the environment' (MME for short) we started off learning about the cellular basis of toxicity (free radical generation, etc) and then moved on to the different types of adverse drug reactions, from 'acute' ones like bleeding after warfarin, to the more 'complex' ones like vomiting brought on by morphine (don't worry, you'll all do this at some point!) - to some extent MME involves a fair amount of common sense, so should be ok for my poor old brains to get through!!

ok enough about my academic life... what else have i been up to? well i just got back from an interview for bredex, which is an educational exchange programme where you spend 5/7 weeks in romania teaching english. it's really important that you make worthwhile use of the summer holidays, cos you rarely get chances to do these things once clinicals start! the interview went ok i think, but we'll have to wait and see what happens!!

anyway, better get back to do some proper work for a change - i've got formal tonight, so am blatantly not gonna get any work done afterwards! will b 'blogging' again soon!

K