Uni Stuff > The University Journey Journal
Vox Nihili, Vox Dei—VN's Medicine Journey Journal
vox nihili:
Had my first week of MPH last week. Overall thoughts was that it was a reasonably slow week but there were promising signs, particularly from last year's cohort who were really positive about their experience of MPH. My subjects are:
Epidemiology 1
This is a core we have to do. I'm looking forward to this subject because I've always really enjoyed epidemiology. Having a look at the schedule for the semester makes it look as though it's going to be a pretty slow semester, but I'm ok with that. The frenetic pace of med is a bit much so it'll be good to wide back a bit.
Biostatistics
Another core but one that I was a lot more concerned about, as I've taken a stats subject before and really struggled. This particular subject, from first impressions, appears to be really well taught and move a lot slower than the stats subject in biomed. I think i'll have a new appreciation for statistics, as it's a skill that I really wish I had developed more, as I'm really interested in evidence-based medicine. The first few weeks will move very slowly. We started off with types of data, which was year 7 maths.
Health Economics
This is my only elective subject this semester and the one that I am most looking forward to. The lecturer we have struggles to convey things a bit, so that's going to make the semester tricky, but otherwise the subject is really well organised and the teaching staff appear to really put a lot of care into the subject, which is really nice to see. Definitely going to be a steep learning curve but I'm excited.
Public Health Leadership and Management
Another core and an intensive. Have had 2/5 days of teaching already and it's been a slog. Really not enjoying the teaching sessions at the moment, which is a bit disappointing as I really hoped to gain a lot from this subject, in particular, I hoped to learn how to manage a project better. Unfortunately most of us have sort of been left scrambling to understand wtf is going on but ah well.
I initially enrolled in a health informatics subject but when the subject material came up on the LMS it didn't really seem right for me, so I've dropped out and will overload in second semester instead.
vox nihili:
Another week (basically) done! I have class until five today but will get in early.
This week has kicked up a little bit compared to last week, but things are still moving slowly.
Biostatistics
We had our second lecture this week and our first tute. Both were pretty (read: extremely) straightforward. The tute dealt with data types, familiar to anyone who's studied year eight maths. The lecture introduced various types of graphs and the concept of median. For someone with a med/biomed background, this has been frustrating, but the slow pace reflects the fact that we have a very varied cohort and is providing me at least a soft-landing back into uni, for which I'm grateful.
Epidemiology
Similarly, we had another lecture and our first tute this week. The tute was very straightforward and examined the concepts of risk and rate, giving us opportunities to work with real data to calculate them. The lecture introduced comparative measures used in epidemiology, namely concepts such as risk ratio and population attributable risk. We've covered this before in MD1, but these concepts are very interesting.
One particularly interesting point (and the example usually given in these lectures) regards smoking. When we think about the risks associated with smoking, we often think about lung cancer. This is very sensible; smoking increases your risk of lung cancer by about 1400%. Does this mean that most smokers die of lung cancer? No, not at all. Indeed, more smokers die of heart disease CAUSED by their smoking. Even though your risk of heart disease only increases by 60% if you're a smoker, heart disease is simply so much more common that this small increase in risk adds more deaths than the MASSIVE increase in lung cancer risk (lung cancer being super rare in the first place). So when you see a smoker, they're more likely to have heart disease than lung cancer and, indeed, more likely to die of the former.
The concept of attributable fractions is also quite cool. Basically this is a way of calculating how much disease a risk factor contributes. For instance, we can use this to calculate how much of the heart disease in smokers is actually caused by smoking. Likewise, we can broaden this out to consider how much of the heart disease in a population (smokers and non-smokers alike) is caused by smoking.
Health Economics
This subject is still a bit of a struggle, but I'm doing a lot of work outside of class to keep up. This is paying off and I'm learning lots, although a lot of it is probably not super relevant to what I'm meant to be learning.
This week in class we learned about the concept of utility (which is an abstract way of describing the amount of "goodness" someone gets from things). We looked at the way that various combinations of goods can achieve the same level of goodness. For instance, 5 $1 coins and 2 50cent coins is equally "good" as 4 $1 and 4 50cent. We then looked at the best combination of goods someone can achieve given a particular budget constraint, which is a fancy way of working out how to get the most bang for your buck.
In my own study, I learned more about supply and demand. This eventually led to having a look at how taxes and subsidies impact on supply and demand. Interestingly, we also looked at policies such as the first home owners' grant; the benefits of which mainly flow to the suppliers (i.e. people who own the house) rather than the purchasers (the people who receive the grant). It turns out there's good reason to suspect it's quite a silly policy, but it's popular amongst the hoi polloi and therefore it continues to exist.
Leadership and Project Management
Also still a bit of a struggle. The teaching sessions haven't really contributed a lot in my view, although others differ in this, which is making the subject itself a bit of a drag. Slowly but surely things are getting better in our practical tutorials. We've been tasked with designing a programme to combat indigenous eye disease. In my group's case, we've been asked to focus on the coordination between ophthalmology and optometry services in the Alice Springs region.
I won't share what our team has planned, but suffice to say we're reasonably happy with it. We also consulted the literature to look at what others had done in this space, and their ideas were remarkably similar, which is encouraging.
K888:
--- Quote ---One particularly interesting point (and the example usually given in these lectures) regards smoking. When we think about the risks associated with smoking, we often think about lung cancer. This is very sensible; smoking increases your risk of lung cancer by about 1400%. Does this mean that most smokers die of lung cancer? No, not at all. Indeed, more smokers die of heart disease CAUSED by their smoking. Even though your risk of heart disease only increases by 60% if you're a smoker, heart disease is simply so much more common that this small increase in risk adds more deaths than the MASSIVE increase in lung cancer risk (lung cancer being super rare in the first place). So when you see a smoker, they're more likely to have heart disease than lung cancer and, indeed, more likely to die of the former.
--- End quote ---
This is really interesting! I'm unsure of the exact numbers/percentages but I know smoking is also a big risk factor for strokes - being a massive risk factor for heart disease must surely be a big contributor to this
vox nihili:
--- Quote from: K888 on March 15, 2019, 03:18:45 pm ---This is really interesting! I'm unsure of the exact numbers/percentages but I know smoking is also a big risk factor for strokes - being a massive risk factor for heart disease must surely be a big contributor to this
--- End quote ---
Yeah the underlying mechanism is basically the same. The chemicals in smoking damage the walls of vessels and make the blood a bit more clotty.
Moral of the story: don’t smoke!
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