MedEx Day 18 - August 1st, 2018

Today was the next to last day of MedEx. To start the day, we finished presenting the Stalker Presentations. These were investigations into a fellow tier mate's social media and internet footprint. Next, we began Day 1 of our 2 day debrief on how our experience with MedEx was. I shared that I loved doing the Pathology Lab Tour, even though I don't want to become a Pathologist, because I enjoyed seeing what Pathologists do. Also, I enjoyed doing QPR and CPR. Both are critical skills, and I feel better equipped to handle a situation where someone has cardiac arrest or where someone is suicidal. After the debrief, we broke up into our Medical Ethics Research teams, and we presented to some of the Tier III students in order to get feedback. Next was lunch, then Tier I presented our Medical Ethics presentations. My group, which had the topic of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and the vaccination/ autism dilemma, went 7th out of 10. I enjoyed presenting my slides on Dr. Wakefield's research, where it went wrong, how he could have improved it, and what autism generally is. My two other favorite presentations were on Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Henrietta Lacks was a woman that was diagnosed with cancer in 1955. She was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Doctors quickly removed a tumor from her body. Upon doing so, the Doctors tested it in order to find out more about the cancer. It turns out that the Doctors hit a gold mine as Ms. Lacks' cells were immortal (meaning they replicated so fast that they could never be killed), so much research on cancer is still done on HeLa cells. The ethical dilemma with this study was that the Doctors did not ask for Ms. Lacks' permission to use her body as an instrument for testing (also, partially racism because the reason cited for not doing so was because she would not understand because of race). The Tuskegee Syphilis Study also had race implications as the study was done on almost all African Americans. In the study, the researchers decided to see how syphilis affects the human body when left untreated, so they told all Doctors in the surrounding area not to give the patients medicine, even though the Doctors knew that penicillin worked as a cure for syphilis. This caused a public outrage and eventually the study was stopped. I thoroughly enjoyed working on my ethics project, so I was a bit sad to finish that up along with my last full day of MedEx. However, before I finished my day, I enjoyed my final get together with my fellow tier mates. As seen in the picture above, we played lots of ping pong and foosball/ had fun.