Neuroanatomy seems to be by far the most hated subject in the whole MD Intermediate curriculum... The reasons ?
1. The subject is quite extensive and very complicated by its nature.
2. Most good books on the subject are equally extensive and complicated, and very few MDII students can afford to devote a couple of months to the exclusive study of such a book.
3. The suggested book is too short and not particularly clear on far too many topics.
4. The lectures and tutorials are very controversial, and don't seem to contribute much (if at all) to the understanding of the subject.
5. The exam questions are even more controversial, completely ignoring basic information (that is clinically significant to most doctors) for the sake of minor details (that are only useful to the extremely small percentage of the class that will become neurosurgeons).
So what can students do ? Completely ignore the subject ? That's what many students did until last year, when the people at the anatomy department decided to change the exam regulations. The new regulations force students to get a minimum of 35% in each subject tested in the anatomy paper, or else they fail the paper, regardless of their performance in the rest of the subjects.
Of course, what the department should have done instead would have been to look for the reasons behind the students' bad performance in neuroanatomy, and possibly introduce changes to the way it's taught, making it more accessible and more clinically relevant. But they didn't.
So what can students do (I ask again) ? Well... What I did, was to ignore lectures and tutorials and dedicate a reasonable amount of time to study the subject from the best book available (FitzGerald et al.), hoping that I would get the minimum required grade. What I should have also done would be to take a look at some lecture notes, to get a basic grasp of the seemingly pointless details that the lecturer considers important. And I should have also gone through the past papers, because there seems to be a certain degree of repetitiveness in the exam questions.
Good night, and good luck.
1 comment:
yes, neuroanatomy certainly seems to be a barrier (together with histology, I must say). Is there anything in common between these two? Well, both are taught by specialists in their field, a pathologist and neurosurgeon, I believe. Is this a coincidence?
It seems to me that what we will need in the clinical years is a basic understanding of the tracts and nuclei in the brain. After all, strokes and trauma are the main reason we bother with neuroanatomy at all.
Thanks to the helpful creator of these notes. I would have found them useful last year.
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