Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 March 2006 10:04:47
I am being extremely lax in my studies at the moment (except for the practical components :) ) due to the horror that is "Foundation Block". This is basically an introduction to everything. And as you have highly motivated and educated people in the course who want to know everything now, tutorials (which are pretty much student led/taught) can go into huge amounts of detail which I believe is beyond what is necessary at this point. Which just tends to make the weaker students freak out and those who like watching the Commonwealth Games sit in front of the tv instead of trying to learn how every aspect of the human body works.
Today in my tutorial I was grilled on the mechanisms of action of some medications. At this stage I am happy to explain in general terms what drugs do and how they do it but for people who have never studied pharmacology or even physiology, what help will it be for me to go into intricate detail on the workings of a drug that acts on a body system they haven't studied via enzymes they've never heard of? And while I can tell them why aspirin has different effects at different doses and how these are mediated, I can't remember off the top of my head the exact reason why a higher dose negates the lower dose effects! And even if I could, I would have to explain a whole new vocabulary of pharmacological terms before anyone even started to get it. Sometimes you just have to accept that something is so until you know enough to understand why.
I will be glad to finish Foundation Block in a couple of weeks and move on to an actual topic.