Getting Touchy Feely is Not Optional

a dispatch from the department of Things They Didn't Tell You About Medical School:

As a med student, your body is no longer private property. By matriculating at an institution of medial education, you have donated your body to science. This is not to say that when you die, your corpse automatically gets shipped off to the Gross Anatomy lab to be hacked up by first-years with bone saws. No, it just means that whenever your classmates need to learn an aspect of the physical exam, you are automatically volunteered to groped by them. It's a time-honored tradition, feeling up your fellow students. It's also a perfectly logical scheme. Why not learn on each other? It's cheap, convenient, fair. But at a certain point it can also feel fairly invasive.

During our first year, we were split up by gender so that girls learned the heart, lung, and abdominal exam on female colleagues, and the boys practiced on boys. For me, having my soft belly poked by some of my more waifish classmates was more intimidating than the idea of having the boys nervously trying to work around my bra as they listened to my heart. But then again, boys have cooties.

During second year, they've really kicked the classmate molestation into high gear. We manipulate each other joints, stare up each others' noses and into our waxy, hairy ears. We had our pupils dilated and enjoyed having bright lights shone in them as our friends stared through ophthalmoscopes, muttering, "Can't see a damn thing... Do you even have a retina?"

This week we got to everybody's favorite lab: venipuncture. Yes, that's right, we learned how to draw blood by assaulting each other repeatedly with needles. It went kind of like this: "Ok...You ready? I'm ready. You ready? You sure? Ok. I'm going in. ... You're sure you're ready? Ok. Here I go. Am I hurting you? You sure? How about now? Now am I hurting you? No? How about now? Ok, I give up."

After what seemed like hours of pocking and prodding with sharp objects, some of us were lucky enough to be proud owners of vials of our own blood! Then we smeared each others blood on slides (harder than it sounds), and attempted to determine our hematocrits by centrifuging samples of our blood. But somebody forgot to put the cap on the machine and so all the tiny little glass tubes of blood went flyyyyyyyyying across the room. I'm sure that's not a biohazard.

Apparently, it's better than it used to be. Back in the day, med students were not only forced to mutually assault each other and call it "learning," they were also used as lab rats and guinea pigs in all sorts of ethically questionable scientific studies. For example, yesterday in GI small group we learned about melena. That's when a gastrointestinal bleed causes your poo to come out all black and tarry (because the blood basically gets digested. Yeah, it's gross.). The professor asked my group how much bloodflow has to hemorrhage into your gut in order to produce this phenomenon. I don't remember the answer to his question (it's something like 500mL), because whatever number he mumbled was completely eclipsed in my memory by the words that next came out of his mouth.

"You know how they discovered that? They had medical students phlebotomize themselves and then drink their own blood."

They made med students draw their own blood (which must have been painful and traumatic in its own right, judging by the righteous bruises my classmates are sporting all over their arms after venipuncture lab), and then drink it until their poo turned black. Made them drink their own blood until their poo turned black.

All in the name of Science.