Endocrinology rocks.

One advantage about the way my preclinical curriculum is set up is that it is very similar to college.

Most med schools will put you in a bulimic state of learning: you spend a solid month in one class, learning all of human body's anatomy for example. You spend days memorizing every aspect of every piece of tissue until you start dreaming about it. Then come test time you have to vomit it all up. Repeat for every class, and it is a wonder we remember anything at all.

However, my days are spent learning all of the subjects at once by systems. Right now I am looking at butts and genitalia. I get to know everything about it: histology, anatomy, physiology, etc. I should know everything doctors know about how the body is when nothing is broken. I think it is great because everything is skillfully woven together, and I do not have to learn all about the hand in one day, then revisit it months later. The best part is that we get to keep the same professor for the whole subject, instead of the usual parade of PhD's needed to sustain a solid month scheduling for one subject.

I particularly love the endocrinology. The professor is pretty popular for several reasons, a great approach to teaching and a light British accent that all makes us swoon in particular.

Today, he proved he is also a gift to mankind by serving as the right hand of GOD, destroying rare diseases left and right. How so, you ask? Well we had a special session in class today, where he brought in two patients affected with diabetes. I won't go into too much detail, but basically one patient was recently afflicted with diabetes. That was the easy part, bread and butter cases for endocrinologist such as our professor.

The hard part was that the patient was had a extremely extremely rare form of diabetes. For months the patient was confined in the ICU while her blood sugar levels raced between record breaking highs, then record breaking lows. After her clinicians exhausted all options, including injecting ungodly levels of insulin to fight off the wave of sugar in her blood, our professor tried a specific anti-inflammatory drug.

It worked. In fact, it worked so well the patient was completely off any diabetes medicine when she spoke to our class. It turned out the patient had type 1 diabetes that attacked late in life when it really only shows up in kids. That kind of diabetes happens when your own body utterly renders the cells that makes insulin dead to the world, leaving none that can help you keep your blood sugar down. It is as if you want to go through a door that you have a key for, but someone stuffed gum into hole, so in frustration you keep jamming your key into the hole trying to get in. Our professor simply took out the gum, in one smooth stroke, with just one drug.

Now that is thinking outside of the box.