The health care system is broken?

This story of a man delivering his own baby gathered many comments about how broken our health care system is. I'm not sure it is though.

In this case, it seems like the delivery went significantly faster than expected. People are also making a big deal about the fact that the doctor wasn't in the room. My experience last summer was that the doctor doesn't necessarily need to be there for the actual delivery. The first hour post birth is the most important one for him/her to be there.

I'm just surprised at how much anger there is about our health care system. I'm also very disillusioned. And studying seems even more important if I need to prove to my patients that I'm not the fool they seem to think doctors are.

It's exam week

I'm disappointed with how little actual school work/learning I've had time to do this year. It's clear that when I have the time to study and stay on top of the work load (eat all those pancakes) I can do very well.

We had a one week course in Emerg/ICU care this semester. I stayed on top of the material and feel like I killed the exam. Yes it's just one week, but that just meant I was able to stay on top of the work. What makes this win extra scary though is that the rest of the class seems to feel that they did not do well on the exam.

The other three courses this semester though, will not go as well. I'm desperately choosing which weeks I will study. Weeks! Not just lectures or parts of lectures I feel are less important, entire weeks!

We had our OSCE last week and despite studying for the past 2 years and feeling pretty prepared for it, I was knocked off my game a couple of times. It was fun but also, as I said to the examiner for the ankle exam, fully humiliating.

Our school has a pass/fail system so that as long as I make my 60%, I'll make it through to clerkship. For the OSCE, we just need 60% of 60% of the stations. But, I don't want to be the doctor that barely made it through med school. I don't want some doc in administrivia hell looking for the last 1/2 % so that no one has to hold my hand through remediation in the summer. I want to do well in clerkship and need to start making studying a priority in my life. Starting.....NOW.