jjablkowski's blog

Thanksgiving Day is on Monday 12 October. There are plenty of things to worry about right now, but there are also things to be thankful for. This year I hope to raise my glass to Dr Edward Jenner (1749–1823), the titular father of immunology, of smallpox vaccination fame. I have kind of a spiritual connection to him. In 1956 and 1957, at the start of my medical career in North Vancouver, I still had time on my hands and I did some part-time work for the North Shore Health Unit. For 2 years I was the doctor in a white coat vaccinating grade-5 pupils against smallpox. 

Even though our professional lives are so much intertwined with society, it has taken a pandemic for the physician workforce to enter the parallel universe of social media and digital socialism. Despite the exponential growth in popularity of social media in the last decade, most doctors have practised social distancing from Facebook and even microblogging sites such as Twitter.

Do you still remember what is the innervation of the flexor digitorum superficialis? The author of a recent Medscape article complains that students are asked to memorize facts that have quite limited clinical relevance, yet they have been deprived of basic concepts used to understand evidence and make decisions. His article, “Anatomy factoids do not create great physicians,” made me think and ask myself: how do we define a good doctor and how do we make one? 

Health care has begun to harness the power of immersive virtual reality (VR). This decade-old technology permits one to experience and engage in a situated and realistic form of macro-learning, which differs from partial task training, where one uses traditional simulators to practice a task, such as drilling through bone or learning arthroscopic triangulation.

It was 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday during our family medicine placement at a local clinic. Having completed a few weeks of the placement, we were deep into the daily routine: history, physical, present the patient case to the preceptor, repeat.