The Art of Medicine

After completing a year of clinical rotations I spent the month of January glued to a desk studying for my Step 1 licensing exam. Supposedly this is the hardest exam I will ever take, and good news I passed!! It's all down hill from here right? After Step 1 we took a brief vacation to visit some friends in California and family in Las Vegas.

first time at the beach and first Starbucks!

For the past 2 weeks, and continuing for the next 4, we are back in the classroom at USUHS for what they call "B3" or "Bench to Bedside and Beyond." Some of the activities are check boxes like CPR re-certification, some are tedious, but some of the activities have been fun and refreshing.

When I was in elementary school I loved art. I took music lessons, dance classes, art classes... I wanted to be some sort of artist. In fact, here is what my 10-year-old aspirations were, represented by my career hot chocolate mug:

In middle school I started to make choices. We had a choice of 1 elective - band, choir, art or home economics. I stuck with music as that seemed more useful than art class. I still participated in school plays and took music lessons, but the visual arts began to drop off. During high school, I continued with music, but sports and academics began to become priorities for me. In college I had a double major and worked for the football team, so that was all the time I had to give. Sometimes I could squeeze in an intramural soccer game, but no music, no painting, and no dancing.

As part of B3 we had some elective choices for activities to do. One of which was mask making at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. I thought this seemed like a cool opportunity so I signed up. Melissa Walker, who leads the art therapy program led us into the art room at NICoE and explained a little bit about the program. The room was filled with examples of masks wounded warriors had made. "You can use anything in this room to do anything you want," she explained. What?? Anything? No Rules? As a military medical student this had become a foreign concept to me. No rubric or requirements? I got to work painting my mask and instantly 2 hours had disappeared and it was time to wrap up the session. My classmates commented on how they hadn't felt so relaxed in a long time. We could see why this was such a great therapy for wounded warriors.

The mask I painted

During the same week we were also privileged to have a lecture from Rick Guiotti, founder of Positive Exposure. He previously worked as a fashion photographer, working with models like Cindy Crawford and companies like Yves Saint Laurent. Then he described how one day he saw a beautiful albino girl and was inspired to learn more and create beautiful images of people like her, rather than the scary images that were available in medical literature. He then expanded to a variety of other genetic conditions and is having an amazing impact on the people with those conditions.

Rick Guiotti - Positive Exposure

I finished this week with an elective in acupuncture. It is still a bit mysterious to me, but with an 80% effectiveness rate for pain improvement (compared to 50% with Motrin!) I can see why it is becoming a popular treatment adjunct. I have 2 out of 3 steps complete to be certified in battlefield acupuncture!