Complaining is something that we're all prone too - we piss and moan when things don't go our way. Justified or not - logical or not - we're all going to vent and gripe about things we disagree with. Some of us do it more graceully and tactfully than others - Nicole is fond of prefacing her complaints with a diplomatic "Now I'm not a doctor, but in my humble opinion..." I am not so nice. My complaints usually begin with "This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of", or, if I'm feeling prim and prope, "I can't believe they're doing it so poorly". Case in point: the physiology department here. Now, I can complain about everything, because, let's face it - no one's perfect, but the physiology department has taken disorganiation to astonishing new heights.

It only makes sense to me, that in order to learn things, one should proceed in a logical order. For example, when learning about muscular contractions, one should begin with skeletal muscle, and then move on to smooth muscle. Cardiac muscle has its own differences and qualifications, so cardiac contractions should be taught within the heart as an organ system, building on a pre-existing foundation of familiarity with contraction in the other muscles. "Nonsense!" says Ross' physiolgy department! "We're going to start off with cardiac contraction, without explaining anything about the conduction system - and then we'll jump quickly to skeletal muscle contraction, then back to cardiac muscle, and we'll jump around between the two until time requres we stick in smooth muscle." The reason my complaining is blunt (bordering on offensive, although I'll keep it to myself, because, as Mom says, those Phd.s can make life harder for me than I can for them) is due entirely to the fact that, you know what? I could do it better. I realize that part of this organizational system may have nothing to do with any logic and may in fact be related to when some big-wig share-holder (because my med school is a for-profit med school) decided they wanted to take vacation, and pushed a lecture series back a few days.

To add insult to injury (because I'm personally offended by this - really, I am), this morning the physiology department decided to start us off with ECGs. I mean come on! Have we done the conduction system? Sure - at the beginning of the lecture, we got the quick-and-dirty low down and SA and AV node potentials vs. ventricular potentials (guess it wasn't that important), but what's the rush? Once again, I feel that if it were up to me (or, say, any particularly bright 5th grader), the organization of this particular subject would have proceeded much more smoothly. Seriously, the heart is complicated enough without jumping around between the big concepts. I truly feel bad for my classmates who don't understand the arterial system (it's not like we've had the anatomy of the heart, and it's not like we all have the benefit of MERP or being the offspring of an interventional cardiologist - this is a purely altruisitic rant).

I hope that, now, my complaint against these Ph.d's perhaps makes a bit more sense. It's interesting to note, though, that although the other departments may employ professors who write questions that lumber through exams like vicious ogres, completely blind-siding us as our number 2 pencils tremble in our fingers, they're at least organized. The physiology lecturers aren't bad per se, they're just throwing around concepts like it doesn't matter. You want to just teach a little bit of it? Fine - I know it doesn't really affect you - you'll get paid either way; but please have some sympathy for those of us who'll actually treat patients. That reminds me of a funny quote from, surprisingly, one of my anatomy lab professors - "Don't just learn this to learn it, you're actually going to have patients some day - you're not doing this to be anatomy Ph.d's; you're learning it to be useful." Amen to that.

*whew* I feel better now; I can go back to taking notes in my physiology class now that I've gotten that off my chest. Guess what we're learning to do now? That's right, count heart rate based on ECG paper.....because, even though a large box is 0.2 seconds, you never know.... I guess they're right; I'd rather learn how to count than to understand the physiology of pacemaker cell depolarization.