"Hands On" or Applicable Labs

I have visions of ‘more effective’ learning in terms of practical application when I update my anatomy classes each year. Bridging the gap from pointing to a heart on a table or even better in a cadaver to reading an MRI or ultrasound. Here is the basic image of a heart that all anatomy students must learn.



However, in the clinical setting very few (or none) will ever see this in a person. What they will see are electrical tracings or images like these:

These look nothing like what they learned in anatomy class. Being educated clinically, means re-learning anatomy in the context that will be viewed with the evaluation tools available. So I must ask myself, as their anatomy instructor, how do I prepare them for the applications of what they actually need to know.

Here at YC, we have a great cadaver program. Thanks to Dr. Bronander many years ago, we were one of the first community colleges in the state to have a cadaver program. I am very proud of what we can offer our students with these resources. We provide students with an opportunity to dissect these cadavers as first and second year undergrads; a privilege that is reserved for graduate students at any university. Oh, I digress…

The cadavers are great, but they are dead! There are lots of things in a cadaver that look nothing like they would in a live person. The spleen for example in a healthy person is a rather disgusting organ (I guess it is gross in a dead person too) in that it is a roundish, fibrous tissue blood-filled balloon. Think of a zip lock bag filled with cotton with blood flowing through it (for filtering of course). In a cadaver it is a hard, dense ‘lump-of-clay-like’ organ that has no resemblance to the squishy, delicate ‘live’ organ. Sorry, enough of the gross talk, I hope you are not eating anything right now. But trying to appreciate the spleen in real life from a cadaver is literally like studying a grape by looking at a raisin. Students can’t imagine how delicate the spleen is and how easily it can rupture (or pop) when a driver hits the steering wheel in a car accident. How can I relay to students how nearly impossible it is to stitch it back together without risk of blood continuing to ooze out of it. That is why the spleen is frequently removed after a traumatic injury. OK, enough of the anatomy lesson but you get the point that a student can’t always appreciate the anatomy they are learning for future clinical use, even in the best cadaver labs.

My dilemma and ultimate goal is to teach the clinical anatomy applications when they are first introduced to the anatomy topic in my class. The online environment is the perfect medium for this to occur. It is more conducive to images than a holding a real, stinky heart. These clinical images are really what they are going to need to know. Thus, the next frontier of my course is to establish basic anatomy along with MRI and ultrasound images so that when they move on to their clinical education they are truly prepared.