A Valid Crashout
Every once in a while in life, if you look carefully enough, you’ll regret paying attention as life smacks you right upside the head with a dose of reality. ‘Cause you know what, the world kinda sucks. Death...
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Section
Op-Ed
10-15 Minutes
By far, one of my favorite aspects of medicine is its progression towards speed and accuracy. A full genome can be sequenced for the cost of a Step exam, with a similar turnaround of only a few weeks....
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In Response to: “Prop 139 is Only the Beginning of the Fight for Abortion Rights in Arizona”
I debated for quite a while whether to reply to Sarah Brady’s article. However, I felt I should do so, if only to offer another perspective to the discussion. Sarah, thank you for speaking openly about a topic...
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Drawing Blood: Why We Should Avoid Repeat Needle Sticks
At the start of my fourth year of medical school, I arrived at the hospital uncaffeinated, hungry, thirsty, and slightly irritable. I was about to embark on my dedicated study period for Step 2, but first I needed...
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Unweaving the Brachial Plexus
I come from a family of teachers, and so teaching was revered in my upbringing. I had unique insight to the experiences of those in my family—the teaching of literature, the arts, geography. In the same vein, medicine...
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Physician Private Practice: Future or Folly?
Once the seemingly endless years of undergrad, medical school, and residency come to a close, the newly minted physician will find themselves deciding not just where they wish to practice, but in what setting. Nowadays there are a...
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Supplements: Score or Scam?
I enjoy working out. And as many 20-something year old males who frequent the gym, I use creatine, a dietary supplement and natural metabolite produced by the body, to help me maintain a high intensity during my workouts....
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Health Equity, How Do We Achieve It?
As I joined the psychiatry team during morning rounds, it was my turn to present on a new admit: a patient with congenital deafness presenting with auditory hallucinations and suicidal ideation. Communicating in American sign language (ASL) through...
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Outpatient Clinic Cartels: The Transition from Doctor to “Health-Dealer”
One day, before going to my CCE, I called their office to ask if my preceptor was in. It took five minutes of explanation for the person to whom I was speaking to understand I was a medical...
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Getting Left Behind: Modern Technology Usage and the DSM’s Difficult Relationship with Behavioral Addictions
Of all the ways that our world has changed in recent years, perhaps no one aspect of our lives has changed more than our relationship with technology. You already know this. You’ve read a similar statement hundreds of...
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Star Crossed: Love in Medicine
One of the first doctors I shadowed as premed was a new attending at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. He took a call halfway through his shift from his fiancé, telling me that this was the only time of...
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Ozempic: The Drug with an Unintentional Identity Crisis
You may have heard of it in the news, on social media, or from your family. Ozempic is a medication that initially came onto the market to treat diabetes, but due to its convenient side effect of weight...
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Zoom Dysmorphia in the Post-Pandemic Era
In 2021, a Harvard dermatologist used the term “Zoom Dysmorphia” in an interview with The Guardian. The term, a play on the psychiatric condition body dysmorphic disorder, has been used to describe preoccupation with appearance resulting from excessive...
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Chat GP: General Practitioner
Over the past few years, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many industries, including healthcare. One of the most promising developments in AI technology for healthcare is the creation of chatbots such as ChatGPT. Chatbots like...
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Medfluencers: A New Plague or Much Needed Change?
Ask any current medical student why they chose to become a doctor. More often than not, you’ll hear the words Grey’s Anatomy, House M.D., Scrubs, or ER in their answer. Simply put, these shows provided us with our...
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Gun Violence and Mental Health
May 24th, 2022 is the day that 19 children and 2 teachers lost their lives to a teen gunman in an elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas.1 A sentence that should never have to be uttered again. What...
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War Tourism
War. War never changes. And neither does humanity’s response to it: anger; disgust; a desire to help; and for some, the lust for thrills. The idea of war tourism is not new. Historians and journalists have been described...
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Dungeons and Dragons: A Med Student Essential
If you’re a med student, the words “free time” may not be too familiar. But you may find yourself having occasional small stretches of time when you can’t bring yourself to smash that space bar repeatedly. Many of...
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Submit for Solidarity Week 2022
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Hello Differential Readers, This year, we are publishing a special edition of the Differential in honor of Solidarity Week 2022 (Feb 14-18th). We are encouraging students, faculty, staff, and the local medical community...
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The Things We Carry
As medical students and future physicians, we are granted permission to witness some of the most intimate and vulnerable moments of our patients’ lives. We are invited to carry with us our patients’ hopes, dreams, fears, and sorrows....
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The Hardest Pill to Swallow
Kneeling on the ruthlessly cold, travertine bathroom floor, lights off, abdominal muscles convulsing, lungs heaving, and hands holding her hair back as she purges her own stomach of boluses that once looked like her mother’s famous Mac ‘N’...
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Día de los Muertos at UACOMP
From October 11th through November 3rd, the Latino Medical Students Association (LMSA), the Office of Student Affairs, and Marketing & Communications set up an altar for Día de los Muertos – a Latin American tradition to honor loved...
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The State of Emergency
There are a number of inevitabilities in life. Death, billionaires avoiding taxes, and people asking med students what specialty they want to go into. As someone who entered med school with the singular goal of emergency medicine (as...
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Navigating Motherhood and Medical School
According to the Association of American Medical College’s 2020 Medical School Graduation Questionnaire, 7.3% of graduating medical students had dependents[1], up from 3.1% in 2016 [2]. There are more people entering medical school as parents or becoming parents...
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Letter to Students from Naomi Bishop
Dear students, I am writing this to you on your first day to encourage you to wear your mask indoors and in the library. I am Akimel O’odham (Pima) from the Gila River Community. I was born at...
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A Weary End
On January 4, 2021, I received my first dose of the Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Signifying many different things to me. Personally, it represents safety in some measure. As an Arizona resident, it creates a sense that things are...
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Ranking the Vitamins – A Holistic and Arbitrary Approach
It’s time for the rank-list no one asked for: an entirely subjective ranking of the essential vitamins from worst to best. I hope you enjoy my completely unscientific and non-rigorous ranking. Agree or disagree? Please vote for your...
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Pop Songs and a Pandemic: An Unlikely Love Story
There’s no logic or internal rhythm to a pandemic—there’s just wondering what might happen next. I started medical school a little more than a month ago, and it’s the strangest feeling, flipping through flash cards in my quiet...
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The Virus may be Running the Show, but the Show Must Go On
Clinical rotations came to an abrupt halt around mid-March. My peer cohort and I had just completed 4 weeks of the rotation, with 4 more left to go before our third year was to come to an end....
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I Fought COVID-19 and Survived To Tell The Tale
Eddie Case is a previously healthy COVID-19 survivor and one of the first 200-identified COVID patients in Arizona. He has graciously offered to share a full account of his story so the public can get a glimpse of...
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Open Letter to UACOMP from Student Group, “AZ Call to Action”: The Need for Social Justice Reform
This Letter comes from a group of students who have placed social justice at the top of their priorities. Students who have joined their community in protest since June 1st, 2020 and have missed not one day of...
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Here to Stay
Long hours, long days As a fly on the wall You may not have much say Good days or bad You’re here to stay And it is up to you Whether or not To let time simply fade...
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Tick Tock
Procrastination. Guilt. Internal unrest. Every medical student feels these emotions at some point in his or her journey—some more than others. Some proudly announce it as an accomplishment or rite of passage, like an all-nighter was during undergrad....
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Post-It: Schizophrenia
Next to me was an emaciated, homeless Vietnamese man in his late fifties. We were sitting in the Emergency Room together, his hand tightly clasped in mine. He was dressed in dirt and wore a baggy, tattered overcoat....
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Anti-Vax Movement in Arizona
Did you know a recent study described Arizona as a “hot-spot?” Not because of our record-breaking summer temperatures, indie music venues, Roosevelt Row, open-air wine bars, or beautiful people mingling in Old Town. Nope nope nope. The Public...
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Ode to the Oath: The Relevance of Hippocrates
I recently revisited the Class of 2019 Oath for the first time since my White Coat Ceremony in 2015. At the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Phoenix, we don’t recite the traditional Hippocratic Oath, or even a modified...
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Suicide: Should we ask?
Note from the Editors-in-Chief: September is National Suicide Awareness Month. As such, this article addresses physician suicide, an issue which already has or will likely affect all physicians. If you or a friend is struggling and considering self-harm...
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Where Broken Hearts Go
The summer between the first and second years of medical school can be an odd existential crisis. You feel like the countless trials by fire should have produced something a little more substantive, a little more accomplished than...
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Welcome Class of 2022
This speech was given by Student Body Vice President Cecilia Chou at the Second Look Luncheon to the incoming Class of 2022. We are printing for the benefit of incoming students who were unable to attend and for...
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Welcome to medical school, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter, but I better not miss a point
I don’t claim to be an authority on how we should approach life in medical school. I know that everyone’s experience is different, and we all have our own daily problems and battles. I am not writing this...
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Wholesome Humanism – Longitudinal Patient Care
The Longitudinal Patient Care (LPC) Course takes places during years three and four of the UA COM-P curriculum. Students are placed in interprofessional teams and are paired with a community mentor. These mentors have chronic medical conditions and...
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Remember Standing at the Bottom when Sitting at the Top
Rushing to take care of every person in the room, constantly checking fluid levels and carrying trays full of equipment, I started questioning whether this is something I could do for the rest of my life. My legs...
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Notes from the Middle Seat
I heaved my carry-on into the 5th overhead compartment of the week and squeezed past a catatonic passenger to take up residence in my usual middle seat. I raked my fingers through the chasm of my purse in...
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Violence Against Healthcare Workers: Can Interprofessional Relationships Help Us Feel Safer?
Healthcare workers suffer some of the highest rates of workplace violence. A quick Google search will pull up countless stories about doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who have been victims of attack. Anyone who works in healthcare...
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Caring for Patients in Jail
On my first day on the job as a jail doctor, twenty-five-year-old Peggy* was brought by guards to clinic after fighting with another inmate. This was her third booking into jail in 6 months. Needle track marks obscured...
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Representation in Evidence-Based Medicine
In our current age of medicine, we often tout the benefits of evidence-based medicine for our patients: better outcomes with fewer unneeded interventions. However, even the name of this approach depends upon the nature of the evidence, which...
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A Letter to the Class of 2021
I was walking out of a grocery store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in November of 2013 when I received the phone call: I’d been admitted to medical school. I cried, called my mom, and celebrated...
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The Heart of It All
I wrote this piece to reconcile my feelings and thoughts about choosing a specialty as I have moved through the first two years of medical school. I’m sharing with the hope that these thoughts may impact others (even...
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Bahá’í and Medicine
As medical students, we are taught during Doctoring to obtain a detailed history from a patient in an appropriate amount of time. Alongside the medical history questions, we inquire about occupation, highest degree, diet, and spiritual beliefs that...
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Starting a New Dialogue
The past week in our country’s politics has left many of us stunned. Whatever our personal opinions, there had been a pretty clear idea of what we thought the two Americas were ever since the 2000 election permanently...
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Doctoring While Female
Let’s all share a collective sigh of relief: we’ve reached Election Day. No matter which party you support, you’re likely feeling either exhausted, disgusted, or both. The campaigns, which have been plagued by scandals, conspiracy theories, name-calling, racism,...
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From the Olympics to Medicine
Simone Biles, Usain Bolt, and Michael Phelps are household names throughout the world. These athletes are known for their success on the world’s highest competitive level; they are Olympians. Since a French winter’s night in late 1892, the...
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Yuma, Arizona: The Last Frontier
Before I began medical school, I always considered the city of Yuma, Arizona, as a mere pit stop on the drive to San Diego, California. Every summer, my family would stop in Yuma to refuel on gas and...
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Atheism and Medicine
When I was asked to write this article, I initially declined. First of all, I wasn’t really sure what I would write about. A piece on being atheist in medicine would be just a piece about me in...
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Losing (and Regaining) My Grip on Reality: An Anxious Medical Student Takes Step 1
I’m writing this article from 30,000 feet above Albuquerque, en route to the East Coast, where I will spend the next several days re-entering the world as a healthy and well-adjusted human. I have spent the last month...
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Faith and Medicine
If you are a student at UA COM-P, then you’ve navigated an aspect of our curriculum, Community Clinical Experience (CCE), designed to expose MS1s and MS2s to clinical medicine during our pre-clerkship years. As a family medicine fangirl...
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In Defense of Eminence-Based Medicine
An internal memo to the members of the Society for Truculent Underappreciated Practitioners of Inpatient Doctoring To arms, august compatriots! Our very way of life is threatened by the hordes of barbarians at our gates. Armed not with...
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Starting from Within
SUPPORTING OUR PATIENTS BY SUPPORTING EACH OTHER Since my Scholarly Project involves transgender health, I routinely peruse some of the new research that comes out involving health disparities in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community....
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I Won’t Be a Bystander. Will You?
I like what is straightforward—who doesn’t? However, I also enjoy facing complex situations: what can compare to the satisfaction we feel when we are able to detangle convoluted clinical pictures? But what I love—and fear—is the inexplicable, the...
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Shattering the Myth of the Model Minority
No, but where are you REALLY from? Unlike some of their friends who sent their children to visit relatives almost every summer, my parents did not bring my sister and me to China until after my high school...
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How I Learned to Stop Eye Rolling
& START LOVING FAMILY MEDICINE “Country Doctor” – One of my favorite photos. By W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures (TIME Magazine), 1948. Growing up, my dad was always pushing me to challenge the status quo. He begged...
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Four Fantastic Family Medicine Myth Busters!
Myth #1: Family medicine isn’t challenging and exciting. It absolutely is!! Family Medicine docs are diverse. We have solo practices and work in large academic centers. We work as hospitalists, take emergency medicine shifts, deliver babies and perform...
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R E S P E C T: All I’m Askin’ Is for a Little Respect…for Primary Care Physicians
Growing up, I never planned to become a physician. As a relatively healthy child, I assumed all doctors were functionally the same as the one I visited for a yearly checkup or for the occasional cough. However, in...
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Surviving (and Enjoying) Your First Year
image11.jpg Students of the Class of 2018 drafting the class oath – July 2014. You tackled the MCAT, maintained a competitive GPA, held leadership positions, and made it through the interviews. And now you’re sitting in (what will...
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Undifferentiated
Welcome to the Class of 2019! I am thrilled to have this opportunity to be a contributor the COM – P student newspaper – The Differential. When I was asked to write this article it was suggested that...
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