Another Year Under our Belts

Well, it is the end of the school year, and we had a great one at AMSA. We have had a lot of great speakers, from malpractice lawyers to med school students to our own Vice President Aaron Hackett (great presentations by the way). The officers want to thank everybody who was a part of AMSA this year, the club would not have been successful without you guys. We also want to thank all of the speakers who took the time out of their busy schedules to speak to us. We all learned a lot from each of you.

We had a great end-of-year social playing billiards and eating a ton of pizza from the Pie. We also elected the new officers for the year 2011-2012.

The new officers are:

• President: Taylor Norton
• Vice President: David McAdams
• Secretary: John Stanger
• Treasurer: Josh Hall
• Publicist: David Garner
• Historian: Brayden Jensen
• Preceptor Corrdinator: Ben Saxey

Congratulations guys! You all have a great opportunity ahead of you and I implore you to make the most out of it. The club is only as great as you guys are willing to make it.

We still have one more activity for the year, and it is the highway cleanup. This will be on Wednesday, April 27 at 9:00 a.m. at the Weber Park and Ride. hope to see you all there.

Once again, thanks to everyone who made the club a great success this year. Here's to a great summer break!

Opthamology!

Last Week we had Dr. Scott Sykes, M.D. talk to us. He spoke about the things that influence a persons choice to go into medicine as well as the ophthalmology specialty. His talk was very informative and provided some great incites for aspiring doctors about whether medicine is the right choice or not.

His main message about deciding whether medicine is for you or not is to do the research and actually experience what it would be like to practice medicine. He said that shadowing was very helpful for him and I know from experience that it was helpful for me as well. No one knows exactly what it will be like to be a practicing physician until they are in that place in their lives where they are actually practicing, but shadowing a doctor or two (or three) is probably the best way to see what it is like for students like us. I highly recommend it and so did Dr. Sykes.

He next talked about ophthalmology and specialties in general. He had some great advice about choosing your specialty and the though process behind it. I know that I myself do not really know what I wasn't to specialize in, and Dr. Sykes helped me feel better about this position. He mentioned that it is not necessarily in your best interest to choose what you want to do before you go to med school. In fact, a lot of people think they know what they want to specialize in until they get into their third and fourth year in med school and experience all the different areas of medicine that they were not exposed to until that time. The message was to be open minded and to look at all aspects of each specialty and how the lifestyle for each specialty would best fit you.

We want to thank Dr. Sykes for speaking to us. Also, next week we will have Dr. Peter Clemens, D.O. come and speak to us. See you all there!

Pros and Cons of Practicing Medicine

Last week we had Dr. Mark Baxter speak to us. He had a lot to say about practicing medicine. He gave us a good look at some of the not so great things that come with the job such as malpractice suits and a busy schedule. These things may sound awful, but for those aspiring doctors out there it is important to recognize that these things do exist in this profession. Dr. Baxter mentioned good things about practicing medicine as well, such as saving lives and improving peoples quality of life on a day to day basis.

Overall the lesson to be learned from this presentation was that to become a doctor we need to accept that there is going to be bad experiences as well as good experiences and that is going to be unavoidable. If we make the best of the situation good things will happen, and if we can't, then maybe we should choose a different profession. I hope that all of you pre-med people out there can take this lesson to heart and accept all aspects of the profession and make a difference!

Through the Eyes of a D.O.

This week we had James Aston speak to us. He is a fourth year student at PCOM, or the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He provided some great insight about the whole D.O. way of medicine and also discussed what it is like to go the military route for med school. Mr. Aston discussed how D.O.s are trained not just in traditional medicine but also in the "manipulative" part of medicine, and in a lot of cases have more at their disposal when practicing then an allopathic trained physician. He emphasized that going D.O. vs M.D. is really up to the individuals preference and that you can have great success in either program.

One great example he gave about osteopathic treatment was that of using this technique in patients who have some type of infection in their body. To speed up the healing process, a D.O. can open up the patients lymphatic pathways through a manipulative procedure (which is all hands on and non-invasive) to allow the white blood cells to get to the area of infection faster and clean it up. He provided a few more examples that were very interesting as well.

We want to thank Mr. Aston for taking time out of his busy schedule and speaking to our club. He also gave us his contact information in case anybody wanted to ask him questions about D.O. training or the military experience through and after med school. His email is jbaJSA@gmail.com.

Next week we will have a primary care physician DR. Mark Baxter, MD speaking to our club. Hope to see you all there!

SPRING SEMESTER

Our new meeting time is Tues at 12:30 in room LL130. Starting January 11 with social activity. We hope everyone is enjoying their Christmas break!

The Home Stretch

As this semester winds to an end, we wish everyone the best. Thanks to everyone that has participated last week in the suturing workshop. Dr. Chung gave a great presentation and had some great tips on how to improve our technique.

Yesterday, Dr. Trask gave us some tips on writing our personal statements for our applications. She told us to start early and to make a list of all our activities and achievements. Decided what attributes or topics that you wish to display to medical schools. This is very important because readers must want to continue reading and be interesting enough that they will want to interview you.

Good luck with finals and have a happy holidays!

PA, ENT, and pigs feet

AMSA at Weber State University has had some great meetings lately.

We had a physician's assistant from McKay-Dee Hospital come and speak to us about the how physicians and PAs work together. Also, she explained about who PAs were, their pros and cons, and compared them with other healthcare workers like nurse practitioners.

Some highlights from her message included that PAs in her office had great autonomy and while this varies from clinic to clinic it really depends on the doctor they work under and state laws. Some of the pros of being a PA include the ability to move around between specialties without needing extensive training (i.g. residencies). She also mentioned that she gets to focus more on the patients that she sees and doesn't have to worry about running the clinic or paying malpractice. However, she said that if she was in our shoes, as students, she would recommend us go all the way to medical school.

Also, Dr. Schuller an ENT doctor from the community spoke to us about getting in to medical school and the life of a ENT doctor. Dr. Schuller spent three years on the admissions board at Dartmouth where he went to medical school. He told us that all of us are unique and that we need to show that to medical schools, because when they go through a hundreds of applications they need something to remember us by. He also told us that coming from a small school like Weber State we are at a disadvantage and that we should rock to MCAT to displace any grade inflation due to WSU's small size.

Coming up next week we have the opportunity to learn some suturing techniques! Reps donated suturing equipment and the club is buying pigs feet from the market so that Professor Chung, M.D. can teach us some suturing techniques. It should be sweet, if you haven't signed up email us and we will see what we can do. Don't miss it this Wednesday 11-24!