Hello readers! Welcome to the Cambridge Widening Access to Medicine Society fortnightly newsletter 😊
Food for Thought: an example interview question
“What are negative and positive feedback systems, and how are they used in the body?”
See the bottom for some suggested approaches to this!
Behind the Headlines
How will AI change Psychiatry?:
The use of AI is becoming increasingly important in the field of medicine, with it taking on many automated tasks, as well as examining radiological findings. Some forms of AI have even been used as surgical assistants, allowing a surgeon’s hand movements to be converted into smaller micro- movements. However, AI’s place in psychiatry is rather controversial and there is a relatively even split amongst physicians around the world about whether AI would be beneficial in this field or not. Those who believe that AI will not be of much benefit in this field see AI being more useful in pattern based tasks, such as examining CT scans. Psychiatry involves forming a rapport with a patient so that they feel comfortable confiding in the physician, as well as the analysis of several characteristics such as tone of voice, facial expression, body language and other such subtle cues. Not only this but there are a range of socioeconomic and ethnic factors that would come into play. The variability in individual cases means that creating an algorithm for a robot would be extremely difficult and also would not be cost effective. It is crucial to clarify that AI does not actually involve any intelligence, nor is it artificial, rather it is a product of the data and logarithms loaded into it. Thus a failure to account for all possibilities could result in many cases going amiss.
However, some do see potential in AI assisting psychiatrists. For example, it could help predict the progression of disease such as the probability someone with acute psychosis will develop schizophrenia. This could just be an automated second opinion to the psychiatrist rather than acting alone. Furthermore, AI can aid in finding out more about a patient in a more reliable way such as assessing sleep patterns from wearable devices rather than simply asking the patient. Personally, I believe that AI does have a place in psychiatric medicine but can never completely take the place of psychiatrists.
Link of the fortnight
Podcasts are a great way to learn about almost anything. Check out some of those suggested in the links above. They will give you a realistic idea about the realities of medicine whilst also giving you plenty to talk about in your upcoming interviews.
Myth-buster
“University and medical school involves a lot of independent learning and I’ll be left to survive on my own”
NOT TRUE! Whilst there is more independent learning involved in university and medical school than there is in secondary school, it is nothing to be worried about! At university, there is still a lot of support available, through your tutors, older medical students, and other students in your year. At Cambridge in particular, each student has multiple points of contact, including your Director of Studies and several supervisors for more academic issues, and your tutor for welfare and wellbeing matters. Older medical students are also often very approachable and willing to help younger students, with both general university advice, and help with the course itself as well! There are also many student-run societies which are in place to offer support to anyone who needs it.
Food for thought: an example approach
Negative feedback systems are processes which reverse any change in conditions, by using output from a system and feeding it back to alter the input in a way to minimise the change. Essentially, it is a way of maintaining steady conditions inside the body.
Positive feedback systems are processes which, upon detecting a change in conditions, further change it in the same way. This does not maintain steady conditions, and instead further exacerbates the change from the normal conditions.
By having a general idea of what these systems are, you can then apply them to different scenarios in the body, which is what the interviewer may then ask you to discuss. For example, negative feedback systems are used in many situations, some of which you may have learnt about already, and some which you may not have heard of yet. A common example is the maintenance of core body temperature. Thermoreceptors in the hypothalamus in the brain will detect any changes in body temperature. Accordingly, they would signal to the brain to make some changes to restore the body temperature. If the temperature increases, they would signal to employ cooling mechanisms, such as sweating and vasodilatation of blood vessels near the skin. As a result, the body temperature would drop, back towards the normal level, and the signals would decrease. An example of positive feedback in the body you may have heard of is the dilation of the cervix in pregnancy, where the stretching of the cervix causes the pituitary gland to release the hormone oxytocin, to cause even more stretching of the cervix, until the baby has been delivered.
The interviewer may then try and get you to explore things you might not have been taught before, such as the potential disadvantages of a negative feedback system. They may prompt you by highlighting the issues with delays in this system – detecting changes in the environment or in the body, and then signalling this to the brain, and then to the effectors around the body to make the appropriate changes takes time. You might be asked to think of alternative systems, for example feedforward mechanisms where you predict a change before it happens, and quickly adapt to minimise the change as it happens.
Thanks for reading – if you have any questions then as ever please just email us at access@clinsoc.co.uk!
Hope you have a great fortnight and GOOD LUCK!
Love,
CamWAMS Committee
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