The 'Peutics Rundown

I said it elsewhere and it deserves restating here: Therapeutics has been a rolling clusterfuck that got off the tracks around week two when Granny P decided to actually glance at the readings she was writing quizzes from. It continued with case questions that suck "on purpose," and then morphed into test questions that apparently sucked on accident. Four weeks in and the changing of the guard occurred but the game stayed the same: these questions suck on purpose and these questions suck on accident. Block two had it's own unique funky fresh flavor though in that the instructor seemed to be willfully ignorant of the current literature and instead just filled in any blanks with his own subjective judgment he presumably gained from his vast experiences shooting drugs up booger holes.

The miraculous TENS unit was shown to be just as effective as a sham treatment (read as: with or without batteries in the damn thing), glucosamine/chondrointin were shown to have positive effects by the National Institute of Health (versus "they suck" via some dude that shoots drugs up booger holes), and ultimately test questions had answers that would "kill a patient" by the own judgement of the course coordinator. But the train kept rolling. Now we're in a whole different kind of pain and I'm not sure any amount of advice or guidance can help us.


But advice like this certainly can't hurt
Every test has come down to "In Shemajo We Trust," because she ultimately does go above and beyond to try to correct some wrongs and lift the class average to appropriate levels. However that's not the point -- this shit shouldn't get to that level of ridicule in the first place. Now the first half of the nutrition module was fine by me. Going 200 miles per hour every lecture when there are off days in the module is silly, and so is hushing people who whisper in a 150 seat auditorium -- but that's a price I'll gladly pay for teaching competency. But since when is competence a standard a class should have to rise to meet? Case in point: electrolytes.


How I feel everytime I hear the word "Electrolytes"
Hyponatremia? Hypernatremia? Clearly interchangeable terms. Hyperkalemia? Hypercalcemia? They sound similar too, so lets just go ahead and swap those out like we're playing the goddamn Shells Game at Caesar's Palace. The textbook's questions? Clearly wrong.

Now, I'm not implying that our instructor doesn't know what she's talking about -- she's probably a pro at this. But I am implying that I do not, in fact, care. I do care about your ability to teach. Novel concept. When you gloss over life-threatening details in patient cases I do get a little heated. Kind of like how when we had a patient with a blood glucose of 120 or so that was our "primary concern," but when it shot up to 240 our primary concern was...


"POTASSIUM?"
Whatever. I'll be in the next room over, and when the patient goes into a coma you can call me and I'll explain to you why we care about both "high" and "really goddamn high" glucose levels.

But still. Even beyond the flip-flopping and glazing over of key details I'm assuming her questions might be somewhat fair if I could cut through the crap and glean any information from these 130 powerpoint slides. Instead, I've got to waste my time memorizing electrolyte ranges that are on every lab printout in the contiguous United States. When I do that, I can start tearing into this 130 slide goliath.

I'll be done in October.

Awesome:

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