Med School Notes by Musicians

When I started med school, I quickly realized I had no idea how to study. Courses where you had to memorize a bunch of factoids had never been my forte nor of much interest to me in undergrad, and they weren’t really a thing in grad school. I excelled in math and advanced courses that required reasoning, analysis, applied logic, etc. When I was younger, I would read the assigned chapters or journal articles and just remember what I needed to and did well with relatively little effort. However, in med school, there is no assigned reading — just lots and lots of lectures and powerpoint slides. I had to quickly develop study techniques and ways of remembering the breadth and depth of information. Some techniques were more useful than others. Recordings good, post-it notes, not-so-good.

I found the task of memorizing seemingly endless numbers of lists of antibiotics, muscles, nerves, diagnostic criteria, symptoms, lab results, vasculature, dermatomes, drug classes and names, to be a challenge. I asked my friends Corin Raymond and Carolyn Mark to record notes for me so I didn’t have to listen to my own voice and so I could listen to notes while doing other things. These helped me get through med school and brought many smiles and laughs along the way. I will forever be grateful to both of them for this.

I’m sharing a few for education and entertainment value.

The Dermatome Song

Feeling forever tripped up by the Dermatomes, I wrote a Dermatome poem and the lovely and talented Carolyn Mark turned it into a song. NB: missing from the song is that S2 can be tested behind the knee and S3, medial thigh – up close and personal.